[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.THE RENTAL REVOLUTIONStill another development is drastically altering the man-thing nexus: the rental revolution.The spread of rentalism, a characteristic of societies rocketing toward super-industrialism, isintimately connected with all the tendencies described above.The link between Hertz cars,disposable diapers, and Joan Littlewood's "Fun Palace," may seem obscure at first glance, butcloser inspection reveals strong inner similarities.For rentalism, too, intensifies transience.During the depression, when millions were jobless and homeless, the yearning for ahome of one's own was one of the most powerful economic motivations in capitalist societies.In the United States today the desire for home ownership is still strong, but ever since the endof World War II the percentage of new housing devoted to rental apartments has beensoaring.As late as 1955 apartments accounted for only 8 percent of new housing starts.By1961 it reached 24 percent.By 1969, for the first time in the United States, more buildingpermits were being issued for apartment construction than for private homes.Apartmentliving, for a variety of reasons, is "in." It is particularly in among young people who, in thewords of MIT Professor Burnham Kelly, want "minimum-involvement housing."Minimum involvement is precisely what the user of a throw-away product gets for hismoney.It is also what temporary structures and modular components foster.Commitments toapartments are, almost by definition, shorter term commitments than those made by ahomeowner to his home.The trend toward residential renting thus underscores the tendencytoward ever-briefer relationships with the physical environment.*More striking than this, however, has been the recent upsurge of rental activity in fieldsin which it was all but unknown in the past.David Riesman has written: "People are fond oftheir cars; they like to talk about them something that comes out very clearly ininterviews but their affection for any one in particular rarely reaches enough intensity tobecome long-term." This is reflected in the fact that the average car owner in the UnitedStates keeps his automobile only three and a half years; many of the more affluent trade intheir automobiles every year or two.In turn, this accounts for the existence of a twenty-billion-dollar used car business in the United States.It was the automotive industry that firstsucceeded in destroying the traditional notion that a major purchase had to be a permanentcommitment.The annual model changeover, high-powered advertising, backed by theindustry's willingness to offer trade-in allowances, made the purchase of a new (or new used)car a relatively frequent occurrence in the life of the average American male.In effect, itshortened the interval between purchases, thereby shortening the duration of the relationshipbetween an owner and any one vehicle.In recent years, however, a spectacular new force has emerged to challenge many of themost deeply ingrained patterns of the automotive industry.This is the auto rental business.Today in the United States millions of motorists rent automobiles from time to time forperiods of a few hours up to several months.Many big-city dwellers, especially in New Yorkwhere parking is a nightmare, refuse to own a car, preferring to rent one for weekend trips tothe country, or even for in-town trips that are inconvenient by public transit.Autos today canbe rented with a minimum of red tape at almost any US airport, railroad station or hotel.Moreover, Americans have carried the rental habit abroad with them.Nearly half amillion of them rent cars while overseas each year.This figure is expected to rise to nearly amillion by 1975, and the big American rental companies, operating now in some fifty countries around the globe, are beginning to run into foreign competitors.Simultaneously,European motorists are beginning to emulate the Americans.A cartoon in Paris Match showsa creature from outer space standing next to his flying saucer and asking a gendarme wherehe can rent an auto.The idea is catching on.The rise of auto rentals, meanwhile, has been paralleled by the emergence in the UnitedStates of a new kind of general store one which sells nothing but rents everything.Thereare now some 9000 such stores in the United States with an annual rental volume on the orderof one billion dollars and a growth rate of from 10 to 20 percent per year.Virtually 50percent of these stores were not in business five years ago.Today, there is scarcely a productthat cannot be rented, from ladders and lawn equipment to mink coats and originals Rouaults.In Los Angeles, rental firms provide live shrubs and trees for real estate developerswho wish to landscape model homes temporarily."Plants enhance rent living plants," saysthe sign on the side of a truck in San Francisco.In Philadelphia one may rent shirts.Elsewhere, Americans now rent everything from gowns, crutches, jewels, TV sets, campingequipment, air conditioners, wheelchairs, linens, skis, tape recorders, champagne fountains,and silverware.A West Coast men's club rented a human skeleton for a demonstration, andan ad in the Wall Street Journal even urges: "Rent-a-Cow."Not long ago the Swedish women's magazine Svensk Damtidning ran a five-part seriesabout the world of 1985.Among other things, it suggested that by then "we will sleep inbuilt-in sleeping furniture with buttons for when we eat breakfast or read, or else we will renta bed at the same place that we rent the table and the paintings and the washing machine."Impatient Americans are not waiting for 1985.Indeed, one of the most significantaspects of the booming rental business is the rise of furniture rental.Some manufacturers andmany rental firms will now furnish entire small apartments for as little as twenty to fiftydollars per month, down to the drapes, rugs and ashtrays."You arrive in town in themorning," says one airline stewardess, "and by evening you've got a swinging pad." Says aCanadian transferred to New York: "It's new, it's colorful, and I don't have to worry aboutcarting it all over the world when I'm transferred."William James once wrote that "lives based on having are less free than lives basedeither on doing or on being." The rise of rentalism is a move away from lives based on havingand it reflects the increase in doing and being.If the people of the future live faster than thepeople of the past, they must also be far more flexible.They are like broken field runnersand it is hard to sidestep a tackle when loaded down with possessions.They want theadvantage of affluence and the latest that technology has to offer, but not the responsibilitythat has, until now, accompanied the accumulation of possessions.They recognize that tosurvive among the uncertainties of rapid change they must learn to travel light.Whatever its broader effects, however, rentalism shortens still further the duration ofthe relationships between man and the things that he uses.This is made clear by asking asimple question: How many cars rented, borrowed or owned pass through the hands ofthe average American male in a lifetime? The answer for car owners might be in the range oftwenty to fifty
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]