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If everyone followed this logic, who would you borrow from?
by gnud 10y ago
If everyone followed this logic, who would you borrow from?
- monknomo 10y agoThe guy in town running the (presumably) lucrative home tool rental store? Do these things exist in urban areas? Seems useful for apartment dwellers who don't have the space for anything more than a tiny toolkit anyhow
- dec0dedab0de 10y agoA few years ago, on the bus home from work, I had a conversation with a mechanic who owned a shop in an economically disadvantaged area. He said that everyone on the block borrows tools from him, and he did it as a way of building a good rapport with his customers.
- maxerickson 10y agoLots of box stores rent out tools. A while back I rented a nice hammer drill for $30 instead of buying a shit one from the same store for $50. For a more niche tool like that, it works out great not to have a bunch of money invested in nicer tools or a bunch of crap lying around.
- monknomo 10y agoSure, I know lots of the big boxes do, but I was imagining something in a downtown area accessible to a car-less urbanite
- dllthomas 10y agohttp://oaklandlibrary.org/locations/tool-lending-library http://oaklandlibrary.org/locations/tool-lending-library
- monknomo 10y agoHuh, cool concept!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoThis is where an [idealised] conception of communism wins, there's a local workshop with all the tools kept in common between people in the area. If you're away from home, you just go to the local workshop. Strikes me as an idiotic waste of resources that a street of a hundred houses would have 50, say, power drills. Most likely they're inferior for costs purposes, they break because they're designed to (capitalism FTW), they're unnecessary duplication and so waste resources. We've seriously missed the mark with design of our communities/society.
- mod 10y agoI use my drill almost every day. I can't have it down the road at the tool library. Presumably I also can't check it out indefinitely or demand it if I feel like my project is more important than someone else's. If you take an object that I use less frequently, say a small tack hammer, I still need it when I need it. I need it for maybe 1 minute or less. I'm supposed to do what? Take my project down to the library, hit it with the hammer, haul it back home? Go borrow the hammer and take it back? Now I've cost myself more in time & effort than it would have cost to just own & store the hammer. Does your solution only apply to more expensive items? More specialized? How does it account for discrepancies of usage patterns? What if I need the work-light but I'll interrupt someone's project? No, I think I'll just have my own set of tools, thanks. I would be okay with a "library for [tools, whatever]" for people who don't often need a screwdriver or corkscrew or something, I guess--but I'm not going to use it. We have an approximation, with maker spaces, companies that loan tools (auto zone etc), neighbors, and tool rentals. (I don't use those either.)
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoI use a drill every couple of months, I think that's relatively high usage across the entire population. FWIW it sounds like a good place for community members to access tools would be at the house you live in.