Comment by darrenf
10 hours ago
Then I guess we’ve been in the dystopia for almost a century now. When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s we leased our TV and VCR. It was hugely common in the UK, the company was on many high streets and literally called Radio Rentals, founded 1930: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Rentals
> Radio Rentals was the largest television rental group in the UK and claimed that at its peak it had more than two million customers, more than 500 shops, 3,600 technicians, 2,700 skilled installers and a large ancillary staff. It had sales and service locations across the UK; the Radio Rentals logo being a common sight on many High Streets.
Y’all forget about the history of telephones?!
Until the 1980s almost all telephones in the US were rented from the phone company.
Renting isn’t some strange uncharted territory — owning a phone is the new concept.
We still have this in the US, it’s called Rent-A-Center and it’s a way to extract extra money from poor people for luxuries they can’t afford.