What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live. Rachel Botsman
older . . . more convivial kind of working together.’14
Kellogg’s six-hour workday produced not just a qualitative social benefit by creating ‘happier’ employees with more leisure time. There were quantitative results for the company, too. The shorter workday influenced employees to work harder. On average, ninety-six boxes of shredded wholewheat biscuits were packed per hour instead of eighty-three.15 Overhead costs, labour costs and the number of work-related accidents also decreased. The company polled workers in 1946 (after the programme had been temporarily suspended) and found that 77 percent of men and 87 percent of women would choose a thirty-hour week even if it meant lower wages.16
Despite its success and popularity, Kellogg stopped its experiment in 1943. The labour shortage and product demand from World War II pushed the company back to an eight-hour workday. President Roosevelt launched a series of policy initiatives that led to the standard forty-hour working week that for the large part we still adhere to today. These political forces were impossible for even Kellogg to resist. As one employee later commented, ‘Everybody thought they were going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal and it really didn’t make a big difference. . . . Some went out and bought automobiles right quick and they didn’t gain much on that because the car took the extra money they had.’17
Today there is a conscious movement to return to the same intentions that motivated the six-hour Kellogg working week. Across America, and much of Europe and Australasia, we are seeing a drive to reclaim leisure time to self-educate, self-relate and revive neglected forms of social capital. The urge to regain meaning and community in our lives is popping up everywhere – and perhaps nowhere more obviously than in our kitchens. Roo used to visit his Grandma Dada in her middle-class home in Wimbledon every Saturday. When Roo walked in the door, he would run to the fridge. Everything you needed to know about Dada could be understood in the way she cooked. She had a routine. The first Saturday would be a roast chicken, the leftover bones would be turned into stock for the following Saturday’s risotto, the leftover risotto would be used for the following Saturday’s stuffed tomatoes, and the leftover stuffed tomatoes would be turned into pasta sauce. Roo and his brothers would joke that when there was something that she couldn’t reuse she’d turn it into the soap she made them wash their hands with. There is more to this process than resourcefulness. For Dada, making lunch was about finding balance through a value system that integrated her history, as well as her sense of responsibility to her family and community. Roo thought of his grandmother in June 2009 when he, his wife and their fourteen-month-old daughter took a trip to China to visit distant relatives. They stayed on the fifty-seventh floor of the JW Marriott in Shanghai. As they walked around the breakfast buffet, he was struck with an intense feeling that what lay before him wasn’t rational. Smoked salmon from Scotland, lobster from Maine, French croissants, Italian spring water and Costa Rican coffee. The sense of globalized freedom that the buffet offered felt overwhelming and oppressive. But most of all, the choices were without meaning. He was in Shanghai, and he wanted a Chinese breakfast and something that made him feel his fourteen-hour flight had transported him somewhere new. And here is where his grandmother’s old world and his own new world values meet, in the desire to find purpose and an authentic story behind what we buy, make, do and create.
Return of the Local Marketplace
In high school, Rob Kalin would skip classes to shoot and develop his photographs. He graduated with a D-minus average but won admission to a studio programme at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Over the next six years, Kalin attended half a dozen colleges before finally finishing his degree, with a major in classics, from New York University in 2004. He was twenty-five years old at the time and pessimistic about how his degree would help him in the job market. The son of a carpenter, he grew up with a ‘hands-on’ approach to life. He started to make furniture in his Brooklyn apartment, turning IKEA kitchen work surfaces into stereo speakers and reclaimed wood into desks. But Kalin discovered it was hard to sell his stuff, even online. There was a lot of ‘advice and hand-holding’ for artisans but no viable marketplace to exhibit and sell their creations. At the same time, he was not a fan of brick-and-mortar chain stores. He would just walk around and see shelves upon shelves of ‘anonymous mass-produced products’ – and think that he wanted to create the opposite experience.
In early April the following year, Kalin was sitting in a big orange chair facing his apartment window. He started to sketch the initial ideas for his vision – a vibrant community of people across the globe connecting with and helping one another, and ultimately buying and selling unique handmade goods direct, with no big middleman. Working with three friends and fellow NYU graduates – Chris Maguire, Haim Schoppik and Jared Tarbell – Kalin transformed his initial scribbles into a live website in just two months. Etsy was born. In just three years, Etsy has attracted 200,000 sellers, a million registered users and more than $27 million in funding.18
Etsy connects buyers with independent creators of all things handmade, the result being that you pay less and the seller makes more. In 150 countries, from Australia to England to South America, more than 3 million people are buying and selling everything from ‘myrtle wood electric guitars’ to ‘crocheted bath puffs’ to ‘bookcases handcrafted from canoes’. At the same time, through forums and live chats, as well as via offline crafts events and workshops known as Etsy labs, the Etsy community provides these artists not just with the platform but with the information and support they need to earn a living. ‘This human-to-human relationship of the person who’s making it with the person who’s buying it is at the core of what Etsy is,’ Kalin explained.19
Kalin posits that handmade ‘isn’t a fad, it’s a resurgence’, and indeed the growth and sales of Etsy have been phenomenal. In November 2008, when much of the consumer world was in a panic, Etsy had twelve record sales volume days in the month; $10.8 million of goods were sold – a 27 percent increase over October; and 135,165 new members joined the community. In the first six months of 2009, more than $70 million worth of goods were sold and more than 1 million new sellers and buyers joined.
Etsy is a throwback to the way consumerism used to be, individuals buying from individuals, and re-creating old forms of virtual market bazaars. It is a part – or you could say a pioneer – of the resurgence in the popularity of older craft industries – knitting, printmaking, crochet, ceramics, quilting, woodworking and so on. More and more people are looking to reconnect with the ties and variety of local and custom-made goods that got lost in mass production. Chain-store culture and shopping centre-fuelled conformity have created extraordinarily impersonal experiences with products that have no history, story or person behind them. In his book What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis observed, ‘Everything’s the same; nothing’s unique; and that takes the fun out of making, buying and owning. But the small-is-the-new-big world could bring variety back. The craftsman lives again on Etsy.’20
In 2009, Kalin travelled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to talk to world leaders about Etsy’s vision to ‘create millions of local living economies that will create a sense of community in the economy again’. In a prepared video message made for the Forum, sitting on an old sofa covered in a pink and red quilt, and surrounded by patchwork cushions, a brightly coloured oversize toy octopus and two teddy bears (obviously all made by Etsy sellers), Kalin explained that ‘these millions of local living economies around the world are more sustainable for the planet than a small number of huge conglomerate companies.’ Kalin is a realist as well as an idealist. He admits that ‘there can’t be no mass production altogether’ but is equally ‘flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Wal-Mart to save twelve cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer’.21 These days it seems more and more people agree with him.
There are currently more than 5,750 local farmers’ markets in the United States, compared with 1,700 in 1994, making them the fastest-growing part of our food economy.22 To put that in perspective, there are more than a thousand more farmers’ markets in the United States than there are Wal-Marts – one out of every three of them started since 2000. There are now 550 farmers’ markets in the UK, compared to one in Bath in 1997. Significantly, 9 out of 10 people in the UK would shop at a farmers’ market if they had the choice. There is a newfound interest in being self-reliant and eating reasonably