The takeaway society - Thought Leader

One thing that really surprised me about the United Kingdom when I first moved across was the number of furnished homes that were for rent. One hardly comes across that in South Africa where most people accumulate their own living things.

It’s not uncommon for the locals to pack a few boxes, tuck them under the arm and saunter off to their new abode. Clothes, bed linen, the favourite coffee mug and their tech gadgets — that is what is being moved.

It’s therefore not surprising that rental is the option for goods and services. Why buy umpteen movie DVDs, for instance, when it is cheaper to rent? And those disks don’t clutter up the environment. Travel light is the motto.

Perhaps the iPod would be the most appropriate example of the takeaway society. With one hit the iPod dispenses with shelves full of CDs. It means at least one box fewer to carry when moving.

What if you want to buy your DVDs instead of renting? Don’t worry, Amazon’s Unbox or TiVO have records of what movies you bought. You could eventually download your bought DVDs over and over again for free.

We don’t need boxes for our photo albums either. Everything is either stored on our computers, on Flickr or even on Facebook. What about those handy telephone booklets in which we used to record our friends’ details? No longer necessary. Those can all be stored on Facebook or other online diaries.

Speaking of diaries, you still use one of those hard-copy ones? OK, I do. But there’s “upcoming”, Google Calendar, your cellphone, PDAs, you name it, for storing your meeting details and important notices. And these applications email you reminders.

Books, I can hear you shouting out. What about our books? Surely we still carry those around with us? Well yes, but Amazon’s e-book, the Kindle, is looking like a winner. So another few boxes eliminated. I used to have 10 boxes of books. I have whittled those down to one, and even that one I stored with a friend when I relocated to the UK.

Have a look at some of the business success stories of recent years and wonder whether these have been driven by the nomadic society we are becoming. Just think about the internet and Google as an example. I needed a locksmith to fix the front-door Yale lock. I googled for the ones within our postal-code area. I actually have two telephone directories I could have checked. Never occurred to me!

This search facility is incredibly important because we no longer know the environment we live in as intimately as we used to. When you have lived in an area for years, you know every shop and service. Instead we can’t do without GPS features on our phone or on a gadget in our car.

Another success story is Amazon, of course. It’s a mobile online shop. You can shop for your groceries, clothes or entertainment online. You could live without leaving your home and your home could be almost anywhere in order to receive anything you want.

What about our jobs? Surely there is some stability there or even continuity of experiences? Not either. The trend shows an increase in freelancers or non-employer businesses. According to the US Census Bureau, there was a growth of 21% between 1997 to 2004 in the number of non-employer businesses in the US. With formal jobs being shed at a rapid rate, there is no reason to presume that this trend was a one-off.

So what do you do when you can’t nip into the office next door or amble across to another workstation to get advice if you are stuck? Then you Twitter it to your buddies who are all checking the Twitter dialogue box all day long. You have instant help and and advice from a string of friends.

Recently I have been learning about the technology available to small businesses. The support available in the technology is huge. As an example, one can hire online boardrooms per hour, per day or per month. It’s software that simulates the entire scenario. All that’s required is a computer, video camera and broadband, and we can video-conference with anybody, anywhere, at whatever time suits all participants.

If you are wondering what new idea might be a winner in order to make you those first millions, besides buying a lotto ticket, then think of any service or product that could help make people’s lives as nomadic as possible. But then this is hardly new, isn’t it? We’ve come full circle. We just don’t use tents for our homes and camels or horses for transport any more.