A counter covered in old yardsticks is a focal point in the Spool of Thread shop in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The shop — a “drop-in sewing lounge” that offers sewing classes, rents sewing machines, and sells fabric — serves area residents who don’t own sewing machines as well as those who do but who want join other like-minded makers in sewing in a community environment, instead of sewing at home alone.
See also: Previous Unconsumption posts on renting things vs. buying them, or collaborative consumption, as some of us refer to it.
If you like this counter, you probably will like the counters/desks made from books here and here, and earlier Unconsumption posts here on other yardstick, ruler, and tape measure uses.
(Photos: top via Poppytalk; bottom via Spool of Thread’s Flickr stream.)
The Sharing Economy | Fast Company
“Business has spent centuries making buying really easy,” says [Shareable’s Neal] Gorenflo. “We’re just at the beginning of making sharing easy.”
Gorenflo is a leading proselytizer of a global trend to make sharing something far more economically significant than a primitive behavior taught in preschool. Spawned by a confluence of the economic crisis, environmental concerns, and the maturation of the social web, an entirely new generation of businesses is popping up. They enable the sharing of cars, clothes, couches, apartments, tools, meals, and even skills. The basic characteristic of these you-name-it sharing marketplaces is that they extract value out of the stuff we already have. Many of these sites depend on millennials disenchanted by the housing bubble and the banking crisis, or uninterested in traditional icons of success such as house or auto ownership. But the number of people who have quietly begun tapping in is impressive: Already, more than 3 million people from 235 countries have couch-surfed, while 2.2 million bike-sharing trips are taken each month. Contends Rachel Botsman, coauthor of the recently published What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption: “This could be as big as the Industrial Revolution in the way we think about ownership.”
Continued here.
Related: Earlier Unconsumption posts about sharing, lending, rental services, and the like.
Via curiositycounts:
DriveNow - BMW launches innovative car-sharing network in Munich, one of the smartest branded efforts in the decentralized ownership and collaborative consumption movement yet.
See earlier Unconsumption posts here for a mix of other sharing-related services and projects.
Neighborly Borrowing, Over the Online Fence
Get college textbooks for less by renting instead of buying - USATODAY.com
It’s about time.
“The rise of rentals means students can see substantial upfront cost savings without having to gamble on buying a used book and hoping the bookstore will buy it back…. Students can highlight and write in the rentals; normal wear and tear is expected.
“The country’s two largest college bookstore companies, Follett and Barnes & Noble, embraced the rental option after successful pilot programs last fall. Just 250 college campuses nationwide offered some textbook rental program during the 2009-10 school year, according to the National Association of College Stores. This fall, some 1,300 campuses will offer textbooks for rent.
[hat tip to Lisa Merkl (@SciFlack)]
10 ways to save money through sharing
“Sharing stuff and services saves money, but the benefits go far beyond the financial — it also conserves resources and builds our ties with our neighbors.”
[hat tip to @ShareableDesign]
SnapGoods: Like Zipcar for Gadgets — CrunchGear.com
Think of SnapGoods as Zipcar for stuff. You reserve an item – an iPad, a bike, a pommel horse, a chainsaw – pay a small amount per day ($10-$15 or more for pricier items), put down a security deposit using your Paypal account, and you pick up the item after meeting the lender or, barring that, you pick it up and drop it off at a place local to you both that acts as an escrow point.
Available in the New York City area, with plans to expand elsewhere.
Also see our posts about NeighborGoods and reviews from FastCompany of other peer-to-peer rental sites (Zilok.com, Rentalic.com, and Rent-Instead.com).
