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How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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The theory is simple: instead of buying a household item or a piece of clothing or some equipment you might use once or twice, you take it out and return it.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

They can be, sure, but they can also be a really good deal. If I know I'll need a certain amount of something on a fixed schedule, I can subscribe to it and save money. This helps reduce costs for suppliers because they have a better idea of how much stock they need on hand, so they'll want to encourage you to subscribe with discounts.

Subscriptions are bad when there's some form of lock-in, such as a fee for breaking the subscription, or if the cost is arbitrarily high without the subscription because of a lack of competition. I dislike digital subscriptions in general because of this, since you'll lose access to all of the content you've enjoyed to that point.

But subscriptions to consumables are fine by me.