There are then good reasons to expect that the rental market should be larger than the market for owning consumer goods outright, yet most consumer goods are purchased to be owned rather than rented. Why then is the market for rented consumer durables not more developed than is the case under capitalism?23 Consider, for example, the preference for homeownership in the United States, a long-standing feature of the US economy. In the last chapter, I noted that the popularity of homeownership in the United States does not make much sense from a strictly economic point of view. High geographical mobility, a result of a far-flung and very dynamic national job market, would seem to favor renting over homeownership.24 Despite this, the demand for homeownership is, and has been for many decades, very strong.
It is not clear that an explanation for the relatively undeveloped market for rented durables can be found on the business side. In theory at least, there is no reason why a company renting out consumer durables should not be profitable.25 Indeed the advantages of the renting model are made clear by the degree to which firms choose to lease capital equipment such as cars, photocopiers, and computers, as opposed to purchasing them. If the rental market for consumer goods is less well developed than might be expected, this seems to be a result of insuficient demand rather than inherent problems with the underlying business model.
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