你想不出门赚取外快吗？推荐型经济允许你向陌生人出租自行车、停车位，甚至家多余的空间。近年来，一些企业给期望通过保管别人财物来赚钱的大家提供了海量新平台。
If a stranger offered you money to keep a suitcase in your spare room, would you accept? How about the other way round: if you had too many belongings1, would you consider trusting someone you met online with their safekeeping? Anthony Paine believed enough of us would answer yes to these questions to launch his own startup, Stashbee. His business links people with space to those who need it.
And its just one player in the booming sharing economy, an industry that relies on people renting out things like their beds, bikes and even parking spaces. Airbnb, a company valued at 200bn RMB, provides a platform for those renting property short-term. DogVacay pairs holidaymaking pet owners with pet-friendly hosts, and aims to be profitable by 2017.
All their business models revolve2 around one simple word: trust. So, how does Stashbee measure up? BBC journalist Dougal Shaw decided3 to try it out for himself. He had some odds4 and ends to store while renovating5 his house, and met a host through the site who could keep them for 475 RMB for two months. All relatively6 smooth and painless.
Heavyweights in the traditional storage industry, such as Big Yellow and Access, arent convinced. A representative from Access told Shaw he was sceptical about storing with amateurs. He cited 24/7 access to the items and better security as the main advantages of his service. cosplayt-wise it would set you back an extra 160 RMB to store with them.
Stashbee agree that tackling security concerns is important, but say business success depends more on people overcoming a distrust of strangers weve been taught since childhood.They arent alone. Companies such as cosplaytockage, Roost and Spacer all run similar storage businesses, and are all banking7 on a shift in consumer attitudes.
And the concept of social storage doesnt sTOP there. CityStasher believe theres a gap in the market for those who want to store things for extremely short periods of time. For example, if you have three hours to kill in a city before your train leaves, what do you do with your suitcase? CityStasher hope you will choose to leave it at a local newsagent, found through their website of course, rather than in the stations pricier left luggage office.
Would you try it out? Its a question of trust.
