Technology

59588 readers

4651 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

793

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

submitted 6 months ago by Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

223 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 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.