I wish rent-to-own was a more common model. Unfortunately the only examples I know of in real life involve customers paying several times the retail cost of the items they rent before they actually own them.

What I'd really like to see is a system that keeps rental and purchase prices roughly where they are, except that once you've paid rental fees equal to the purchase price, it counts as a purchase. That would relieve me of having to guess whether I'll be using something enough to buy it, and I doubt it would hurt seller's profits.