Access over ownership

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When close to 300,000 umbrellas belonging to a Shenzhenbased startup, Sharing E Umbrella, went missing across Chinese cities last year, it was confirmation of two things.

Contrary to what Rihanna said, you cannot stand under someone’s umbrella (Ella, ella, eh, eh, eh) and the offering of some products in the (choose one that you dislike the least) crowd-based/sharing/peer-to-peer economy, just doesn’t work.

Owning “stuff” has long served as an assurance of one’s place in the world: status, or a marker of having finally arrived by virtue of what car you drive, where you live and holiday and what you wear. Over the past 10 years, however, consumers in (mostly) developed markets have been tending towards an asset-light life over acquisitiveness. This has given rise to what has become known as (again, choose one you dislike the least) the crowd-based/sharing/peerto-peer economy.

Upending industries

You will know the pioneers of this fast-growing sector movement: Uber, Airbnb, digital music service Spotify, or even New York’s bike-share programme, Citi Bike. Depending on who you talk you, it also includes companies like Netflix and Uk-based Deliveroo, a high-quality takeaway delivery company. The word sharing, which in its purest form means the joint use of a resource, denotes social conscience a type of collective good.

At their essence though, these businesses are no more sustainable or virtuous than their traditional corporate profit-making peers — money is simply being exchanged for goods and services. What we’re taking part in really is collaborative consumption and access to services and facilities has become more democratised.

It’s obviously an evolving sector, in which business models are still being refined and companies are still having to navigate regulatory issues. But even conglomerates are now cashing in on the sharing economy. Google parent Alphabet, which was one of Uber’s first big investors, last October invested $1bn into Uber’s US rival, Lyft. And General Motors has partnerships with both ride-hailing companies.

So, back to the brollies.

The deal went like this: customers had to make an initial deposit of about R33 after which they were charged R1 for every half hour of use.

It didn’t work, for two reasons.

The nature of goods shared matters; like a basketball-sharing service, instead of returning the item to custom-designed kiosks or docks, people (light-fingered or not) deemed the service more trouble than it was worth. It stopped being convenient or sufficiently compelling enough to change consumer behaviour.

Finally, in any financial transaction big or small, whether the model is asset or access-based, trust is a crucial element. . . .