Author Topic: TIME article on "Testing the sharing economy"  (Read 1975 times)

galliver

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TIME article on "Testing the sharing economy"
« on: February 11, 2015, 11:29:30 AM »
Sorry, it's behind a paywall, but if anyone else is a subscriber: http://time.com/3687305/testing-the-sharing-economy/ (I subscribed with expiring airline miles, so I'm enjoying "free" TIME for a year ;) )

Here are some interesting excerpts:
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To get here, we needed eBay, PayPal and Amazon, which made it safe to do business on the web. We needed Apple and Google to provide GPS and Internet-enabled phones that make us always reachable and findable. We needed Facebook, which made people more likely to actually be who they say they are. And we needed the Great Recession, with its low-wage, jobless recovery, which made us ask ourselves how many possessions we really need and how much extra we could make on the side. The sharing economy–which isn’t about sharing so much as ruthlessly optimizing everything around us and delivering it at the touch of a button–is the culmination of all our connectivity, our wealth, our stuff.

The key to this shift was the discovery that while we totally distrust strangers, we totally trust people–significantly more than we trust corporations or governments. Many sharing-company founders have one thing in common: they worked at eBay and, in bits and pieces, re-created that company’s trust and safety division. Rather than rely on insurance and background checks, its innovation was getting both the provider and the user to rate each other, usually with one to five stars. That eliminates the few bad actors who made everyone too nervous to deal with strangers. “They figured out a way to move from a no model to a yes model,” says Nick Grossman, a general manager at Union Square Ventures, a venture-capital firm that invests heavily in sharing-economy companies. “The traditional way is you can’t do it unless you get a license. That made sense up until we had data. Now the starting point is yes.”

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The economic shift these companies are exploiting isn’t just technological; it’s also cultural. First of all, it’s easier to share now that more people live in cities. (More than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas, according to the U.N.; by 2050 it will be 66%.) “If we were a corporation, it would be our job to get the most value out of things we own,” says Lisa Gansky, author of Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing. “We’re coming to an era where as an individual it’s becoming our job to get value out of it.”

More important, the homes of rich people and millennials are increasingly stark; only poorer people are still piling up stuff in their guest showers and storage units. Material goods have gotten so cheap, they’ve become burdensome. My great-grandmother lugged a brass candlestick on a ship from the old country; I can get a set of new ones on Amazon for $30. Look at Sex and the City and the Carrie Bradshaw culture of ‘Look how big my closet is and look how much I’ve spent on shoes,'” says Jennifer Hyman, co-founder of Rent the Runway, which lends high-end women’s clothing to its more than 4 million members. “It would be considered kind of yucky today to do that.

It also makes some interesting less-Mustachian points:
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Almost all happiness studies show that experience increases contentment far more than purchases do, and young people intrinsically understand that, fueling an experience economy. Working at Starwood Hotels after college, Hyman learned that the most effective way to earn customers’ loyalty was to get them to have their honeymoon at one of the company’s properties, so she created a wedding registry of experiences such as snorkeling and zip-lining instead of objects like decorative bowls and china sets. A survey conducted last year by the marketing firm Havas Worldwide found that only 20% of people in industrialized countries disagreed with the statement “I could happily live without most of the things I own.” “You can only Instagram your new carpet once,” argues Hyman, “whereas you can take photos of every meal, every vacation, every rented dress.” We’ve moved from conspicuous consumption to conspicuous experience.

So the sharing economy is really the experience economy, and more specifically the experience-it-right-this-second economy. Some companies, like Hyman’s, buy stuff and rent it out, while others, like RelayRides, truly involve peer-to-peer sharing. But they’re all the same to the customer: they get you stuff instantly and easily.

bacchi

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Re: TIME article on "Testing the sharing economy"
« Reply #1 on: February 11, 2015, 08:29:52 PM »
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We’ve moved from conspicuous consumption to conspicuous experience.

Travel is always worth it!!!111 Especially if it's expensive, exotic, and you selfie instagram as it happens!

Instead of working at jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need, we work at jobs we hate to do things that don't really make us happy (but impress our friends). Yay.

tlars699

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Re: TIME article on "Testing the sharing economy"
« Reply #2 on: February 13, 2015, 09:33:14 AM »
I'd still rather have the experience than the stuff, really.
Which means that conventions with over 10K people aren't really worth going to- to have to wait in line 2-3 hours just to see the two or three things you wanted to? Yeah, no thanks.