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your junk on eBay is SO last decade. The new way to get money for all
the stuff you've accumulated throughout the years is to rent them.
In his Newsweek article, Rob Baedeker tells us how he makes money hand over fist by renting stuff he wasn't using anyway (and that includes his dog Berkeley):
Call me a rentrepreneur, one of the growing ranks of Americans who, in a postbinge economy, are finding creative ways to make a quick buck by hiring out their personal belongings. The movement is being fueled by a slew of new startups catering to what some are calling “collaborative consumption.” There are now sites to connect people who want to rent out their cars, couches, personal services, dinosaur costumes or clay-pigeon launchers ($12 per day on Zilok.com). For renters, the sites offer goods and services for a relative bargain (weekly rates for a rental car where I live in Berkeley, Calif., can be twice what I charged). More than that, they’re a chance to bypass corporate America at a time when corporate America is in the dog house. Why endure the long waits, high prices, and surly staff at your big-box tool-rental counter when you can pick up Rob Baedeker’s electric sander for a song—and go home with a smile?
There’s a virtue in this business, too, part of a postrecession shift from a throw-away society to a new economy of reuse. My customers might be in the 99 percent, but they’re not broke or unemployed. Same goes for my fellow rentrepreneurs. Yet after witnessing the fallout from a half-century-long frenzy of conspicuous consumption, a whole generation of us is now reexamining the long-forgotten “waste not” maxim exemplified by the sugar-packet-saving thriftiness of our grandparents. I can almost hear my Depression-hardened Nana speaking to me from the grave: “You’ve got all this crap lying around, man. Put it to use!”
I joke about renting a laundry-folding robot because seriously, who likes to fold laundry? As it turns out, I could probably find one to rent if I looked hard enough. I could also rent a tree, a goat, a wife(?!) or any of the 20 things listed in this handy infographic from The World’s Biggests. Link
Felice Cohen lives in a Manhattan “microstudio” that measures 12′ x7′. My home office on the back porch is twice that! She pays $700 a month rent and considers it a bargain. That’s because the average apartment rent in this Upper West Side neighborhood is $3,600. Link -via Metafilter
A new website called Rent the Runway is betting that it can do for haute couture what Netflix did for movies:
“It was so easy. You just wear it and drop it back in the mail to them,” Ms. Harris said. “I don’t spend $2,000 on a dress regularly, so it’s nice to be able to wear some of the more expensive brands I wouldn’t be able to buy otherwise. And instead of just buying one or two dresses for this season, I can still have a lot of things to wear.”
Rent the Runway was founded by two recent Harvard Business School graduates, Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Carter Fleiss. Ms. Hyman said she got the idea for the service last year after watching her younger sister agonize over whether to buy an expensive new outfit to wear to a wedding.
“Here was this young girl who loves fashion and was willing to spend a good portion of her salary on a dress that she’s only going to wear once or twice, and I thought, there has to be a solution for this,” said Ms. Hyman.
Jenna Wortham of The New York Times has the scoop: Link (Photo: Todd Heisler/NY Times)
Psst! Do you need friends, relatives, or even your boss to come to your wedding but don’t have any? If you’re in Japan, then you’re in luck: no need to make friends, just hire ‘em!
Office Agents, a Tokyo-based company, rents out friends, work colleagues and even relatives to pad out the guest list.
For £127, one of the company’s agents will attend the wedding as a guest, while a heart-tugging speech will cost an extra £64 and a song or dance will set clients back a mere £32.
Brides or grooms who want to impress their prospective partners with their sheer volume of friends are among those secretly padding the guest list with fakes.
The recession has also boosted the popularity of the service. With unemployment rising and a growing number of Japanese in part time jobs, people rent fake bosses or colleagues.
Others turning to the company for fake work-related guests are those who have recently lost their jobs but want to maintain an air of respectability, according to Hiroshi Mizutani, who heads Office Agents.
