Rent a Friend: How to Successfully Make Friendship a Business Commodity?

A friend in need is a friend indeed and there is no involvement of money with it of course. So, it may sound shocking to many people when they see that even there is a website to rent friends. www.rentafriend.com is the website and it is surely not a joke as it could make into the Google Hot Trends which suggest that many people are curious to know about it.

In their website, it is written:

"GET PAID TO BE A FRIEND. Be your own Boss, set your own hours, set your price, work when you want to and keep 100% of the money you make! Now accepting new applications! This is the ultimate job!"

The website authority have clearly mentioned that it is not a dating site and they are only promoting friends and friendship not love, dating, romance or sex. At first the idea seems to be really shocking and to some extent disgusting. After all, we like our friends simply because it is more of an emotional relationship not a job or professional relationship.

Then, if you look at the other side of the coin, in rich countries like USA, people are becoming busier with their career and works and find very little time to socialize. Of course, many people now a days cannot find time to even cook and they prefer to take meals from food shops. So, they cannot afford to spend time to search friends.

Thus, for finding friends, people are moving online like Facebook or Twitter. Finding a friend in Facebook or Twitter is time consuming and not that easy. The matter is that you can have only one boy friend or girl friend in the romantic sense but you can have as many friends as you wish in the friendship sense. From this point of view, the concept of ‘Rent a Friend’ makes some sense perhaps.

As for the business or cash side, anyone can register in the website for free and create their profile. However, only paid members can send a request to a member to accompany him or her in an event like a party, visit to a place or relative or whatever. The person who is seeking a friend would have to pay the person who is going to accompany him or her.

The person who is working as a friend has the full right to decline anyone he or she wishes. They are also entitled to set their own hourly rates for proving friendship. The best part is that they can keep 100% of their earnings. Rentafriend.com will earn money with membership fees it gets from the paid members.

This sounds to be a good thing for lonely people. There are many aged people who do not have good relationship with their family and relatives and for them; rent a friend perhaps will bring some hope to remove their loneliness.

On the minus side, friendship comes with efforts and trying and emotion. So, if this kind of service becomes popular then many people may want to solve the problem of not having a friend with spending some cash. There is also the risk of sexual advance and especially, for women, it can be a scary thing from time to time.

It is not clear that how the website authorities would ensure that no sexual harassment takes place. In the website, it is written, "We have a very strong stance on physical contact. There is no physical contact at all during your time you spend with a member! You are there to provide friendship only."

So, friendship is at last becoming a business commodity. What next?