Sharing economy: the risk that web giants will kill bartering

FUTURE SHARING ECONOMY –

Sooner or later, reality had to be faced. Now that the sharing economy is no longer an expectation, a new world coming, but a gigantic holding company that has a turnover of 15 billion dollars a year and involves approximately half of American and English consumers, its critical points are coming to light, the gray areas. And even the distortion of its initial paradigm, which had promised us more participation and less compulsive purchasing, almost an antidote to the drug that rigged the engine of global capitalism that exploded with the Great Depression of 2008.

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SHARING ECONOMY AND BARTER –

The American magazine Fast Company, which deals specifically with innovation, has published an investigation with the emblematic title, The sharing economy is deadA provocation, certainly, but also a sign of how much the perception of an economy that has replaced ownership with sharing is changing.  An economy on which the big shareholders of financial capitalism, those who are ready to bet on the culture of sharing it had to put in crisisUber, for example, is already valued at $40 billion, four times that of Hertz, but the most surprising, and critical, thing is something else: the company has raised $10 billion in financing in just a few years from banks like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank, which we left in the dock during the Great Depression and now find among the protagonists of the new world. Uber, which terrorizes taxi drivers and rental companies, is invading the mobility market with operations dumping, unfair competition, and even sub-minimum wages. More or less the same accusations leveled at Airbnb, which places 12 million guests every day in homes and residences transformed into bed and breakfasts: its latest valuation is $24 billion, $3 billion more than the Marriott chain with its 4,000 hotels worldwide. And who controls Airbnb? Funds, American, British, and even Chinese. Other easy-money lords, like the hated bankers. BlaBlaCar, a community of 20 million people who pay for car rides, raised $200 million in just a few hours, coming from investment funds ready to exploit the new digital economy with the old instrument of cheap and easily accessible cash.

The pervasiveness of the sharing economy It is now total, and no longer excludes any sector of industry or servicesFlubes is a platform that organizes soccer matches with almost 400 thousand members, while the various communities of the car sharing, in its various forms, now boasts over 2 million users. So, what is the risk for the automotive industry in the face of this long-term wave that calls into question not only a twentieth-century status symbol—car ownership—but also a lifestyle? And how much will this shift impact the delaying of the hoped-for economic recovery we so much talk about but so little see? In the United States, it's been calculated that, following the explosion of car sharing, the average family will go from owning, and therefore purchasing, 2,1 cars to 1,2. That's practically half, while each shared car replaces nine owned ones. And already today, 200,000 Milanese citizens no longer need to own a car to drive around the city center.

La sharing economy It also risks dealing a blow to the apparel and luxury goods industries. The former is worth $400 billion, but used goods traded through online platforms are already worth $34 billion. And on eBay alone, high-end products from Tiffany and Ralph Lauren are worth $50 million. Meanwhile, through sharing, we've realized that a third of our wardrobe—the average for an Italian family—is unused. So, even in this sector, a 1980s-style recovery in consumption is certainly not on the horizon.

SHARING ECONOMY SAVINGS –

Finally,  The sharing economy has always promised us huge savings. And somehow it's keeping this fundamental expectation at the forefront of our consumer minds.Last year, remember, "savings" was the most searched word on Google. But sometimes the equation "sharing equals saving" doesn't hold up. Fast Company in his investigation he pointed the finger at the electric drill, the symbolic object of the dawn of sharing economyRemember? Considering the actual usage time of a drill, it was said, it is definitely more convenient to rent it than to own it. Elementary, unless you verify with the related discovery that in reality an electric drill on Amazon costs 30 dollars, and it arrives to you in 24 hours, while if you rent it through a platform sharing economy You have to pay $15 a day. Which is more convenient?

Capitalism, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter taught us, is made of deaths and resurrections. Therefore it was inevitable that sharing economy a mechanism of "creative destruction" was set in motion, and it was equally predictable that traditional capitalism, now dominated by finance combined with technology, would enter the field with its self-defenses.We are in a transition phase, in a global search for a new development model, and the final word will be given by them, the consumers, and above all by the Millennials, the generation born in the 1980s who in 2020 will represent a quarter of the Italian population. Men and women very different from  baby boomer, more unscrupulous and more unfaithful in purchases of all kinds, ready to change on the fly based on a single word: convenience.

TO KNOW MORE: Millennials, the revolution of new consumers