Umbrella-sharing startup loses most of its 300,000 umbrellas in its first weeks | Hacker News Reader

Umbrella-sharing startup loses most of its 300,000 umbrellas in its first weeks

shanghaiist.com

32 pointsdanso20 comments

Why are they called sharing companies? You are renting things. Sharing is when I give my neighbor something or let them borrow my tools.

It seems all companies are wanting customers to lease or rent their products nowadays. Cars leases, cellphone installment plans, Spotify/Apple Music/Pandora, SaaS products, renting instead of buying homes...

What happened to ownership? I feel the consumers always loose money and only gain temporary convenience. Yet I still "rent" some things regardless of my thoughts, it's the only "better" option in some cases.

The cases for which these companies are made are usually the "better" ones.

I'm not going to buy a new car or house every time I fly into D.C. or Los Angeles for the week, I'll just use Airbnb or Uber.

According to the article they are charging 19 yuen for something that costs (presumably at scale) 60 yuen and have no real way to ensure they don't get stolen this way. Not sure what they really expect :\

Why the hell was this comment downvoted? It has correctly summarized the problem: the company is effectively selling umbrellas for 1/3 the wholesale price. Increase the deposit to 70 yuan and you don't have to mind if people keep the umbrellas.

I would like to upvote that comment many times. The price point for the deposit is important, why is this so hard to understand?

The reason it failed is because of this simple use case:

You want to return it just after you arrived, and it is still raining outside (this is why you rent an umbrella in the first place). If you wait for the sky to be clear to go out, you won't remember the umbrella. But if it is raining again when you go out, why would you want to return the umbrella???

No they are not. It is a deposit. The price is 1 yuan per hour. (50 jiao per half hour)

A deposit is something you get back when you return the item. A price/cost is something you never get back because you do not return the item.

Regardless of what the credit card statement or receipt says, you pay 20 yuens and get to keep an umbrella, so "price" is the right description.

I would think it should be 5 jiao per half hour, as 1 jiao = ¥0.1

I am not sure how they thought this would succeed, unless they plan on pivoting into the most distributed umbrella retailer ever.

Umbrellas are too cheap to defend with technology. Something like GPS wouldn't help recover umbrellas in a cost effective way, maybe in some future where GPS receives are a penny apiece, but not today.

The only way I see to deal with the problem of people keeping umbrellas is to bill people who take them. Get their credit card or other payment information and let them know when they spend their quarter, or whatever, on the umbrella that if they don't return by a certain time it they will be charged for it. Then you just accept that you are an online retailer with a storefront of everywhere.

Even then this presumes that somehow the umbrella is unusable without registering, how do you make that happen? I will just presumed they solved that one.

>Umbrellas are too cheap to defend with technology. Something like GPS wouldn't help recover umbrellas in a cost effective way, maybe in some future where GPS receives are a penny apiece, but not today.

I wouldn't go as far as locating them, but keeping track of them using technology seems feasible. How about having an NFC tag implanted to the umbrella to make sure it is returned?

I bet you'll find that ppl will rip out the chip and return just that, unless there's a human checking the returns.

Do you think there are enough disreputable people to make that a problem?

I mean it chip has a unique ID or its not doing its job, and you get the payment info of each user. There are incentives to not stealing these things, so you are really just worried about vandals and immoral penny penchers trying to skirt the system.

Then take their deposit and ban them from the system when you come to inspect and found the chip without the umbrella...

wow "14 other competitors in the umbrella-sharing industry"

So how do the others do it?

I could only imagine some simple number lock unlockable when you scan a QR and pay a deposite, but I don't know how return could work. Maybe it could be verified by someone else unlocking it from the same place you claimed to have left it? And if nobody ever unlocks it, because you just took it home, it flags you as a thief after 3 times?

Or slightly snowbally: you pay 5 dollars to get an umbrella with a number lock and only get it back when someone else rents it again. This way you have to make sure to put it where it gets used.

Ah, dedicated stations of course work, but take away some of the organic simple nature http://umbracity.com/

edit: one with number locks: (I wonder how the return works) https://www.shanghaiexpat.com/news/umbrella-sharing-comes-sh...

That kind of system seems similar to how Aldi encourages people to return shopping carts with quarter "deposits" or let others put them back for a quarter.

But you have to plug it in to the others to get your coun back and there is one initial dock dongle thingy.

Also many supermarkets (at least in germany) start doing some weirdly accurate geofencing with automatic breaks on the carts. I wonder how it actually works. edit: http://www.gatekeepersystems.com/sol_cc_cc_how_it_works.php

A shopping trolley is a whole heap more annoying to have around when you have finished shopping than an umbrella is when it's stopped raining.

Who funded that idea? Was there like a special Olympics of startups? That is a seriously stupid idea.

Some countries specialize in seriously stupid.

At first I thought it was an onion article; its sad for the business but funny headline.

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