How the Chinese ruined a company by stealing an umbrella (8 photos)

Sharing scooters, bicycles, cars is a great idea. No need to buy to use once a month. And in China they decided that this idea should be extended to other important things that are not always needed. For example - for umbrellas.





Oh, few people have been wrong in this life as much as this Sharing E Umbrella company!

Good Umbrella Intentions



This is what the umbrella rental station looked like, with a hood, very modern

A Shenzhen-based company opened umbrella rental centers in 2017 in case of rain. In total, it was decided to open in 11 major cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Nanjing.

The location for installing rental points was also chosen wisely - at metro stations and bus stops.





It's funny that all the photos of the return of such rental umbrellas are advertising or stock

Imagine you've been driving for an hour and come to a part of the city where it turns out to be raining. How convenient it is not to blame yourself for lack of foresight, but to simply rent an umbrella for literally pennies, without leaving under the roof of the station. And when you go back, just return it to the rental point at one of the stations.

300 thousand umbrellas were purchased for this cause. According to the business plan, rental was inexpensive.



The umbrella startup is now trying to take off in Europe. Well, maybe it will work out, people there are accustomed to order. Maybe.

What went wrong?

People began to massively forget to return their umbrellas. Some are forgetful, simply deciding that they took an umbrella from home in the morning.

Those who, out of greed, once took it in their hands, then feel sorry to give it away.

In three months - from April to July - Sharing Umbrella lost track of MOST of all the umbrellas it offered for rental.



What an interesting lock - it locks the umbrella on the railing. It is necessary to agree with the city service to use the railings

Because the economy was simple:

Every 30 minutes of rental cost the client half a yuan. But when renting, you had to make a deposit of 19 yuan.

And it turned out that if everything costs about yuan per hour, then if you forgot to return the umbrella for a day, you have already spent the entire deposit, and you will also be fined. It’s easier to tear down the umbrella or just wait until the tracker on it “dies.”



People are also afraid of getting a fine if the wind breaks their umbrella.

And keep the umbrella for yourself. Because guilt, fines, overpaying for a rain umbrella? Even seemingly decent citizens didn’t want all this headache.

Some “expired” umbrellas were bashfully thrown into ravines outside the city to hide their “crime of carelessness.”



You forgot your umbrella on the bench, well, you won’t run around looking for it all over the city, where

Since there are so many Chinese, almost every umbrella met its end. Some took and returned the umbrella, but after five to ten rentals it still ran into its “bad man.”

This was inevitably purely statistical. And now the company is at a big loss.

And this is against the backdrop of the fact that a bicycle rental company in China went bankrupt at about the same time. They were also ashamed to return them or abandoned them somewhere in remote areas of the city.



At one time, rental bicycles in China were clearly too much

And what did the dreamers with umbrellas hope for?

By the way, we now have power bank rental centers for charging your phone. Have you used it? It’s terribly inconvenient for me, there are too few rental shops, and none at all near my house. And what is its meaning then?