Collaborative Consumption (Are You A Part Of This Forecast Change In How We Consume?)

[AnyDream]

Typical, GenYers taking all the credit!!! Gen Xers (in my circle anyway) have been doing this for a long time, and I suspect that the pre-war generations did a lot of this too, but informally in small family and neighbourhood-based networks rather than with the help of social and online networks - which increases the range of the resources available but possibly also adds to the complexity or even dare I suggest the commercialisation of such networks - for example I was checking out some of the websites mentioned in the wikipedia article on this topic, and I noticed that many of them are fee-based.

I agree there is a reputation-based benefit...we've all had the experience of lending something only to have it returned, dirty and/or trashed, or unusable.

Like you, my sister and I swap a lot of goods back and forth, sometimes they come and go several times as our needs change over time.

There are a number of boxes of toys that have done the circuit between households, depending on teh ages and stages of our children, they have back and forthed. Likewise bicycles in different sizes have gone back and forth, also swingsets.

Looking around my house, very few of my pieces of furniture have been bought brand new from a traditional retailer. You wouldn't know it by looking at it though, it doesn't "look" like "secondhand"...which I think is a feature of this trend too. People don't necessarily hang onto stuff just because they spent good money on it/it was such a bargain. So there's more good stuff in circulation. I wonder how much the shrinkage of homes/outside storage areas (like sheds) has contributed to this...unlike the Baby boomers who typically aspired to own large homes then filled them with 'stuff' that stayed there for decades, younger people Xers and Ys are more likely to live through a number of changes of life circumstance - homes, relationships, careers, localities, perhaps we value things like flexibility and mobility more than stability.

Book swapping - well this one's been going on since the dawn of printed material...and I did notice that when I was financially able to buy more books and therefore contribute more to my informal network, I started to be given newer and more interesting books than when I was a partial participant...so there was already a participation-based reward system operating.

Also, having worked in a large govt organisation, i was a little surprised to see how much stuff is bought and sold or traded on their social-club networks.