There is a well-known psychological effect that something in one's possession is valued more highly.[1] As such, if users can easily keep these umbrellas and d

There is a well-known psychological effect that something in one's possession is valued more highly.[1] As such, if users can easily keep these umbrellas and do not have moral qualms about doing so, it could feel like a particularly great loss to return them. Possible solution: The umbrellas could have stopped working by having an electronic component that locks them after, say, 2 days.[2] Then the user is left with a worthless umbrella but they can return it to receive the refund of their deposit. So they would do so as long as the refund is worth their trip. (I can only assume that the endowment effect is not high enough to make them hold onto a locked umbrella they cannot use.) However someone said that the deposit is just the cost of a hamburger or a cheap (not good) bowl of noodles, so this might not cover the cost in time and inconvenience of returning the umbrellas, even if broken: they might instead throw them out into their household trash if they don't care and have no moral qualms. So the two issues are: - Endowment effect; the user gets a full umbrella if they steal it and forfeit their deposit, and they could value the full umbrella more. Resolution: reduce the value of the umbrellas by breaking them after 2 days in user's possession. - Direct cost of returning them. The deposit can be a sunk cost and in this case the user might not value their trip to return the umbrella enough to get the deposit back. Resolution: increase the price of the deposit enough to cover most people's time. Note that under this resolution rich people (whose time is worth more) will still fail to return the umbrellas (instead possibly even throwing them into household trash): so if 10% of users are rich, then it is important to make enough money off of all users to subsidize this. This requires understanding the statistics of consumers. So there are specific microeconomic reasons this might have occurred, that may be resolved in a future iteration, but they require sophisticated resolutions by the company. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect [2] possible mechanism: it is not really realistic to keep umbrellas fully open all the time, so the locking mechanism just has to keep it from opening after being closed. (For example via a tab that comes up along the central pole/tube, near the top, so that you cannot open it again after closing it.)