It’s vastly larger than you need to house your family and to meet your needs. It tries to act like a hotel (that’s what those guest rooms and extra bathrooms are for), a gym (bigger mcmansions have a room just for exercise equipment), a movie theatre, a bar, a restaurant, a swimming pool, etc. The problems with this are :
a. Having all this excess stuff doesn’t make most people any happier. A lot of McMansions (the ones near my parents house that I personally saw over the years, for instance) are shoddily built and require a neverending slog of repairs and maintenance.
b. Most actual people don’t use most of the features almost all of the time. Most of the extra rooms (dining rooms, etc) never are entered, no one ever swims in the pools pretty much universally (for one because most Americans are too fat too look good in a swimsuit, for another because McMansion pools are too small for real swimming, they are basically just a water sucking status symbol)
c. Going out and about to use community owned versions of the above functions is probably better for your social health than to stay inside using the McMansion version
d. It’s much, much, much cheaper to just rent the above facilities when you need access to them and to purchase a home that only acts as a home and not a shoddy version of all those things I mentioned. Plus, when your parents come to visit, wouldn’t you rather they stayed in a nearby hotel than in the guest room?
Says the dude who has never used a car share car.
Members who leave a mess get fined - Enterprise/ZipCar knows exactly who used the car last. I won’t say it doesn’t happen, but it’s rare and minor when it does. I’ve had the excruciating inconvenience of someone leaving their CD in the player once, and someone else leaving their parking slip on the dash. Oh, there was a gum wrapper on the floor once, too. Just disgusting.
One thing about rentals. Whenever I had a rental vehicle, I put it through some abuse. As one of my previous co-workers said - What gets to places that no 4 X 4 would even attempt - Rental vehicles
Not really a rental, but we used to have several community vehicles at work. They were the worst vehicles in terms of maintenance or just general upkeep as they were not assigned to any one person.
I’m not a huge consumer of those things so maybe I’m ignorant, but I’ve never heard of renting music, books, magazines, software or newspapers. Newspaper rental? Is that a thing? I guess some of those have gone to subscription models, but I’m drawing a blank on how rentals would work.
I’ve heard of renting VHS/DVDs. There used to be a store on every street corner that did precisely that. I don’t understand how spending $25 on a DVD makes you smarter than those fools that rent it for a couple bucks though. When it comes to music, I’m more familiar with people having an ITunes library of purchased music that far surpasses anything the previous generation had.
Maybe we Millennials don’t feel the need (insecurity? ;)) to keep buying tons of crap so other people think we’re successful. Maybe we’ve seen our parents do exactly that and end up with a ridiculous amount of debt. Maybe a bunch of us saw our parents lose their job(s) during the Great Recession and struggle to find a new one as an older worker who doesn’t have the skills for the changing job market.* Maybe we saw how scarier that debt was to them then.
And maybe we saw how conspicuous consumption didn’t actually make our parents happier.
and competes against just out of college kids also desperate for jobs and willing to work for peanuts.
Commuting an hour each way to work so you can live out in the suburbs where there is room for your McMansion is a shitty way to live
Living in your castle and stuffing your face with beef every night isn’t that amazing. There’s a lot more fun things to do in life than that.
Those damn McMansions and the trucks in your driveway eat up such a huge chunk of disposable income that there isn’t much left. And then you whine about taxes.:smack:
You have to be perpetually in fear of getting fired or laid off since you need a flood of money coming in every month to pay all the bills
Every McMansion resident fears all their neighbors because despite living in an upper middle class white/asian neighborhood where crime is nonexistent, the news says that predators are around every corner. So everyone just hides in their houses and many of them purchase guns which of course can result in worse things than the crimes people are most afraid of.
Despite having a mcmansion, a driveway full of trucks, etc, everyone is generally fat and ugly and so are their wives. What a great, enviable life.
I think you’re conflating your experience with car sharing, which in the context of your OP is more accurate than the one-off renting that’s been around for decades. When you’re going to use the same car again next week, you tend to mind how you treat it, and when the company you’re paying membership to fines you for leaving a mess for the next user, you tend not to.
Not rental as much as electronic subscription service for mags/newspapers. Software, books, CD’s DVD’s and now ebooks can all be had at the library, some in the past and have evolved to other electronic platforms.
As for music, subscription service for that, too. I’ve had a Napster-now-Rhapsody account for about a decade. $10 a month for all the music I can handle. That’s less than a CD a month if I were to buy all the music, I have thousands of artists and their albums in my library, I could never afford if I had to buy it all.
No I don’t. But when there is no ownership of something, there is a tendency to be a little more careless with it
When I had a rental, there is a natural tendency to be a little harder on it than something that you own. I am not taking about outright abuse but there is that potential of hard use
Cripes. Well then so what? Something goes wrong with the car, they fix it or replace it. Something happens on the road, they bring me another car. These are not jalopies, they get regular maintenance and are new up to a couple years old. Like I said, they’re SHARED vehicles, people tend to not mess them up as they are accountable, and because they’re going to need that car again. What are you not grasping here? Did you not even look at the site I linked?
