Stuff We Didn’t Know About Until Today: You Can Rent A Friend

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Need a friend? Instead of wasting time trying to meet someone the old-fashioned way, why not just pay someone to spend time with you?

RentAFriend.com offers up friends for hire with prices ranging from $10 to $150. If you need someone to go to a movie with, go for dinner with or be a wingman on a night out with, you can just search the site and connect with someone who’s willing to do it with you—for a fee.

The site, which has been around for six months, already has a reported 200, 000 members.

Although the site says that it’s not a dating or escort site, one of the most offered services, according to the homepage, is renting a friend to be a prom date (oh, that has teen-angst movie plot written all over it, doesn’t it?).

While some of the suggested uses for the site do seem pretty practical (having someone show you around town or teach you a skill), many of them seem a bit like a crutch. Has social networking changed real-life interaction to the point where we need to pay someone to be a real-time friend? Is this the next step in social networking fads that continue to kill, you know, being social?

Next up: Have no friends? There’s an app for that!