Myth of the sharing economy: There's no such thing.

There Is No "Sharing Economy"

There Is No "Sharing Economy"

A blog about business and economics.
Dec. 26 2013 10:02 AM

There Is No "Sharing Economy"

Renting's not sharing.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

While I like many of the companies that tend to fall under the banner, I'm finding myself more and more annoyed by the term "sharing economy," which is used as shorthand to categorize a fairly miscellaneous set of firms virtually none of which involve sharing in any meaningful way. Under the circumstances, I was glad to see Rachel Botsman's presentation on how the sharing economy lacks a shared definition in which she attempts to rescue the concept with a more precise typology.

But I don't think it works. This is a dumb term, and it deserves to die.


It started, as best I can tell, with Zipcar, which predates most of these companies and from the get-go described its product as "car sharing." The main problem with that description is that it wasn't car sharing. Zipcar was not and is not a service that facilitates the formation of automobile co-ops in which multiple households combine to collectively own and share a fleet of vehicles. That would be an interesting idea for a business, but it's not Zipcar's business. The way Zipcar's business works is that a firm owns a fleet of vehicles and then offers them as short-term rentals to its customers. They made up the word "car sharing" because the rental car business was well-established already, and Zipcar wanted to rent cars in a different kind of way, so they needed a way to signal to people that it wasn't a head-to-head competitor with Hertz.

But of course things metastasized. So when cities started creating municipally chartered short-term bicycle rental entities, those were known as "bike sharing." Things really got nasty when Airbnb launched a short-term rental platform for residential housing, because both the housing and hotel sectors are heavily regulated and taxed in different kinds of ways. Wouldn't it be better to just say we're sharing rather than running a hotel? Tom Friedman's latest sharing economy column is about a website that seems to be a platform for selling used clothing.
