I found this article on, not the end of consumer driver society, but the beginning of a new paradigm, collaborative consumerism.
In November 2008, a 34-year-old security guard called Jdimytai Damour was trampled to death at a Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, New York, by what local papers described as an "out-of-control" mob of 2,000 "frenzied" shoppers who had queued overnight in the promise of a slash-price sale. With the crowd outside chanting, "Push the doors in", staff climbed on to vending machines to escape the resulting stampede. Even when police later declared that the shop was closed because it was now a crime scene, angry shoppers remonstrated with officers. One yelled: "I've been queuing since yesterday morning." The bargains on offer included a 50-in plasma HDTV priced at $798.
Rachel Botsman, a "social innovator" who has presented her ideas at Downing Street and before Microsoft and Google executives, retells the event in her book, What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live. "It's a sad and chilling metaphor for our culture at large – a crowd of exhausted consumers knocking down the doors and ploughing down people simply to buy more stuff."
Botsman rails in the book against the excesses, futility and contradictions of mass consumption, but she doesn't rehash the usual tropes of anti-consumerism. Rather, her book is a cry for us to consume "smarter" by moving away from the outdated concept of outright ownership – and the lust to own – towards one where we share, barter, rent and swap assets that include not just consumables, but also our "time and space".
The notion of "collaborative consumption" is not, she notes, new – it has been around for centuries. But the arrival of internet-enabled social networking, coupled with "geo-located" smart phones, has super-charged a concept that was already rapidly gaining primacy owing to the twin pressures of our environmental and economic crises. Echoing the Japanese concept of muda – the relentless hunt for, and eradication of, inefficiencies in any system – collaborative consumption aims to exploit previously ignored or unnoticed value in all our assets by both eliminating waste and generating demand for goods and services that are otherwise "idling".
Botsman uses the example of motoring to show where collaborative consumption already makes sense. "Cars are 90% under-utilised by their owners," she tells me from her home in Australia. "And 70% of journeys are solo rides. So we now see car club companies such as Streetcar proving very popular in cities. In Munich, BMW now has a scheme where it lets members pay for a car by the minute rather than by the hour. And websites such as ParkatmyHouse.com are allowing people to make money from unused space outside their properties. A great example is a church in Islington, London, which was facing financial trouble. But it started renting parking space out front and it now makes £70,000 a year from doing so."
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