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The Sharing Economy Was Always a Scam

‘Sharing’ was supposed to save us. Instead, it became a Trojan horse for a precarious economic future.

Susie Cagle
OneZero
Published in
14 min readMar 7, 2019

FFounded in 2014, Omni is a startup that offers users the ability to store and rent their lesser-used stuff in the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland. Backed by roughly $40 million in venture capital, Omni proclaims on its website that they “believe in experiences over things, access over ownership, and living lighter rather than being weighed down by our possessions.”

If you’re in the Bay Area, you can currently rent a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo from “Lan” for the low price of $1 per day; “charles” is renting a small framed lithograph for $10 a day; and “Tom” is renting a copy of the film Friends With Benefits (68 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) on Blu-ray for just $2 a day. Those prices don’t include delivery and return fees for the Omni trucks traversing the city, which start at $1.99 each way.

In 2016, Omni’s CEO and co-founder Tom McLeod said that “lending enables Omni members to put their ‘dormant’ belongings to good use in their community.” That same year, Fortune said Omni “could create a true ‘sharing economy.’” For a while, the tenets of the sharing economy were front and center in Omni’s model: It promised to activate…

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OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Susie Cagle
Susie Cagle

Written by Susie Cagle

Reporting, drawing, politics, policy, economics, technology, labor, JSK Stanford Fellow 2016, susie dot cagle at gmail

Responses (77)

What are your thoughts?

I see the current economy as vastly unstable and unsustainable in its current form. These businesses that “simplify and enrich” lives are merely another systemic factor that has emerged from a society that hasn’t seen a real living wage increase…

Capitalism wasn’t tamed, as Werbach had hoped — it was stoked.

As a disabled person living in an emerging economy, the altruistic utopian ideals mourned in this article could not have changed my life for the better or provided an opportunity to many where there was none in the society in which I live, in the…

Great column. As you say, “sharing” is the wrong word. The correct one is “renting.” Basically, people are only producing tools that create a different, wider, group of rentors without being subject to consumer protection regulations.
On the worker…