20th
Be rich, own nothing
Imagine if you wanted to get up one day and move closer to the beach, wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to pack up your kitchen utensils, organize all your drawers and disassemble your ikea furniture?
What if everything you used was leased to you, it was always in good condition, maintained, and swappable for a different model or piece.
Does everyone need a kitchen? What if we could have food made for us, what does each person in an appt building having a kitchen cost? How often is it used? Would you pay a monthly fee to have a kitchen in your building that made your meals for you? Food made to order on demand sound appealing? Sure some people really enjoy the act of cooking, I personally really enjoy eating.
Seth Godin’s book on Permission Based Marketing has a nice bit in where the author illustrates how a service based company can have advantages from both a sustainability point of view and a service level point of view. He asks you to imagine paying a monthly fee to have a car in your driveway which is always fueled, well maintained, and replaced every few years. The incentive of the company is to produce cars in a manner that they can easily be recycled, maintained, and which are more fuel efficient, you on the other hand can just get in the thing and drive.
Take a look at our consumer based society in this short, which isn’t really short as far as the attention span on the web.
Would you trade your kitchen for a cook or your car for a chauffer?
