We Subscribe to Everything, We Own Nothing
How the proliferation of subscription based services may be repackaging old problems
From tangible to intangible things, from our music and television, to our news, to our transportation, to our food, to our cloud data storage, to our Amazon prime delivery, to our photo editing software, to our cell phone and cell phone plan, to our cars, to our internet service, nearly everything we use regularly seems to be moving towards this model of unlimited or tiered usage tied to seemingly affordable monthly payments ranging from a few dollars upward, that remain on a consumers balance sheets indefinitely.
It seems everything consumable from the food we eat, to the art we enjoy, to the services we rely on these days comes with a subscription and we don’t own any of it outright. As of two years ago, “[N]early half of American online shoppers pay for streaming-media services.” Many people now lease their phones from the big carriers instead of buying them. The result being that consumers don’t own something as potentially intimate as their own cell phones, and they will never pay them off, and therefore can’t sell them for cash should they wish or need to.
Lyft co-founder, John Zimmer and board Director, Valerie Jarrett, discussed car services moving towards subscription-based models in the future as opposed to the current charge…
