How would you feel about using a pair of snowshoes for a full day for $3?
Or maybe a tent for $10? Or even a kayak for no more than $15?
And when you’re finished your kayak cruise, you just return it at your leisure with no worry about finding space to store it in this crazy city where few can afford a condo with a large storage locker, let alone a house with a garage.
If that sounds good to you, you may want to check out the Thingery, coming soon to Lower Lonsdale. A Thingery is billed as a community-owned lending library of things, with a parent organization, Thingery HQ, handling the administrative side while people from the community buy memberships to create a co-op. Items up for grabs are stored in a converted shipping container which members can access whenever they want through a personal code. Items ranging from skis to hammers to sewing machines to power tools are potentially available, with lending prices ranging from free up to a maximum of $15 per day for big-ticket items.
“It’s a way of life,” says Thingery HQ member engagement co-ordinator Erin Roberts. “The nice thing is that it’s completely self-serve, so you don’t need to worry about having a Thingery representative there. You can just walk in and take what you need, when you need it, for as long as you need it.”
There’s one Thingery up and running in New Westminster with several others, including North Vancouver, in the process of recruiting members. Until July 31 interested parties can sign up for the North Vancouver location – slated for First Street between Lonsdale and St. Georges – for a one-time, refundable $50 membership fee and get 50 per cent off the annual fee, bringing the first year total to $64.50.
When 50 members sign up – there were 18 on board as of July 18 – Thingery HQ will have the necessary capital to purchase a shipping container and get to work converting it into a lending library.
North Vancouver’s Alex Yallouz, who jumped on board the Thingery train after reading about it in a Facebook post, can’t wait to try out some of the sporting gear.
“I am really looking forward to some of the outdoor equipment,” she says. “There’s rumours that there are going to be kayaks in there – that’s something I’d really like to get my hands on.”
Yallouz falls squarely into the Thingery’s target demographic. She’s a 26-year-old living in a rental apartment who doesn’t have the space or cash to build her own stock of gear.
“I have a tiny little storage locker. I can barely fit my hockey gear in there,” she says. “I’m a millennial. Living in Vancouver isn’t always so easy, so to be able to take advantage of what makes Vancouver so great at a price that doesn’t make you have to not have a meal the next day is a great option.”
Co-op members have a say in what items go into the Thingery, with some of the stock coming from member donations and other things purchased at the will of the group.
“When you donate something you get borrowing credit towards other things,” says Roberts. “It’s a way of getting more things by contributing what you already own.”
Thingery converts, however, contend that the concept isn’t just about just using stuff, it’s about sharing resources, building community and reducing waste.
“From the perspective of the sharing economy, these are things that we don’t use every day,” says Yallouz. “They’re not ‘life essentials.’ They’re things that we can share with our community members and all take turns using. I think in that regard it strengthens our bonds as a community.”
With prices high and storage space low for many young people in the Lower Mainland, there has been a shift in the way people think about ownership of things, says Roberts.
“I think we’ve kind of come to a point where we realize that gathering things isn’t really going to make us happy. Just storing everything in a garage – nobody has a garage anymore to store things in,” she says, adding that there is a strong environmentally conscious bent to the project. Even the shipping container itself is a repurposed item.
“I think a lot of it is really targeting to that millennial problem of not being able to afford as much, but also not really wanting to accumulate as much,” she says. “Definitely we get a lot of people that are very environmentally conscious that want to join because they are trying to help reduce waste. Even just the packaging of buying a new item, to the fact that a drill is used maybe 10 minutes of its entire working lifetime when it’s bought by a single person. To be able to share use of that drill, it’s going to have an extended lifetime and it’s going to be used and not kind of tossed away without fully being utilized.”
For more information visit thethingery.com.
