Who want to deal with spending, at minimum, two hours of time to buy and then sell a $40 item, when you can just buy the $40 item and keep it on a shelf.
This is, I think, the most important point. The fact is when considered as a single transaction: the $22 drill vs. the $22 guy that comes out drills holes may seem like a wash. But given a usage interval of 6 months and a likely life span for the tool of 5-10 years, you are looking a $220-$440 cost for the service. If your goal is not to profit off people who don't own tools, but rather maximize use of existing tools, and somehow you can make the whole thing work without charging anyone a dime, you are still converting a 5 minute job (pull the drill out of your storage box, and drill 5 holes) into hour or so job (fire up the app, request a drill, it tells you where the nearest one it, you go there and get it, go home, drill your holes, then store it, then some time later you get notified by the app that someone needs the drill so you stay home while that person comes by to pick it up.) Ok, so maybe you could simplify that process, but most of the simplifications still impose time penalties, or costs. The point is, for me, after two jaunts through the process I'd start seeing $22 for my own drill as a bargain.
The whole approach would be more likely to work the more expensive the tool (or other object) and the less frequent your need. Thats why car share services work in cities with 1M+ population, but not in the town of 2000 I live in.
The other thing is informal stuff like this happens all the time. I don't own a MIG welder, but my brother does. He doesn't own a plasma cutter but he has a friend that does. Neither of them own a tubing bender, but I do. So tool sharing is common among existing social peer groups, and it works without an "uber" because there is existing trust within the group that if I borrow and break the welder, I'll pay to repair it. When you lend to strangers, you would need a group to guarantee that your $1200 welder will come back in one piece.
You & the parent comment both offer great points. When looking at them together, along with the OP's article & many others on the "sharing economy", you see there still remains great opportunity & challenges in the almost inevitable "Sharing Economy"
