This is not a bad idea. Not sure how much money they expect to make but still a neat concept. I wonder if they’ll give any free umbrellas to homeless people, because it seems to me you’d only be able to rent the umbrellas if you had a credit/debit card.
And how about all those people making their living selling cheapass umbrellas - are they going to hold this program hostage to Big Raingear?
Well, there goes the whole plot of How I Met Your Mother.
Who can keep track of an umbrella for an entire 48 hours?
Pretty cool. Obviously they’re counting on people having to pay a late fee, and overall Umbracity should turn a great profit.
I managed a video store one time and came up with the idea of making all of our “floor vhs / DVDs and video games” (anything not on the new release wall) a free rental, no purchase necessary, and the more free items you rented (up to five total at any one time) increased the amount of time you could keep it: one floor movie = one day free rental, two floor movies = two day free rental, up to five for five days (which always encouraged people to take five at a time.) But there was a late fee, which was a modest $1 per item per day. It blew new customer’s minds: their choice of 20k+ vhs/dvds/games available for free, as long as they returned them on time.
Of course, very few people returned their free rentals on time, and we made a ton of money on old items that had already paid for themselves two or three times over.
Probably stick ads on the top of them so that everyone looking out of a multi-story building sees nothing but a sea of moving billboards, then this service probably wouldn’t even have to pay for the umbrellas.
Actually, if you could buy enough of them in bulk cheap enough and screen print them, that would be a pretty good form of advertising - with no rental service necessary. Just give them away.
Dunno. Umbrellas are kind of useless for Vancouver’s rain, especially for tall people like me. It never rains hard, just a constant misty drizzle that somehow goes sideways and up and gets you wet no matter how big your umbrella is. I’ve found that the only way to protect yourself from the rain is to where a rain coat, hat, and waterproof pants and boots. But an even better way to deal with rain in Vancouver is to stop caring about it and get on with your life.
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