The Aeron Economy
July 10, 2023 2:49 PM   Subscribe

 
Let's not forget that a lot of office furniture is made by prisoners effectively as slave laborers. Even public universities are buying slave-made office furniture. The amendment that ended slavery didn't really end it, and that's fucked up. Even more so if there is that much office furniture being landfilled every year. Make them build it for free, and then tear it apart and bury it.
posted by hippybear at 2:57 PM on July 10, 2023 [10 favorites]


My software co went mostly remote in 2020 and downsized our office from something that supported ~200 people to a smaller one that can hold ~50 and often has more like 15.

Some furniture just moved right on over, but we had a very intense office lottery system where most of the big / fun / useful / goofy items were given to employees. As a result my hour now has a few extra desks and chairs, our backyard has some outdoor furniture originally found on the office roof deck, but also there's a spare mannequin in our basement and a painting of a monkey playing a banjo in my office.

I'm sure *some* things ended up in a landfill, but we tried pretty hard ...
posted by feckless at 3:07 PM on July 10, 2023 [11 favorites]


Everything that gets landfilled is something a consumer will have to purchase new. There are no useful incentives for re-use; capitalism abhors it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:08 PM on July 10, 2023 [11 favorites]


There are no useful incentives for re-use; capitalism abhors it.

Well, there used to be a store on North Ave in Chicago called Gently-Used Office Furniture.
posted by hoyland at 3:19 PM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


The employers could have simply given the chairs to the employees. My employer didn’t, something about taxes or liabilities or some other bottom line. We all went out and bought our own home office chairs at our own expense. Marked the start of an era of anti-employee hostility.
posted by shock muppet at 3:26 PM on July 10, 2023 [9 favorites]


Well, the post-COVID WFH boom might be accelerating or expanding the used office furniture market, but it's hardly a new thing - even dinky Cleveland Ohio has had (off the top of my head) at least 3 big resellers of used office furniture for decades. I'm sitting in some fancy Haworth right now that was probably something like $1500 new that I bought for $150 or so. (You do have to poke carefully through the enormous warehouse floor full of chairs to get ones that aren't busted in some fashion, and even then you can often buy replacement parts fairly cheap.)

As far as I can tell from chatting with the staff at these resellers, a ton of companies in the Before Times just figured it wasn't worth it to pay movers to schlepp office furniture to new digs and just bought new stuff and unloaded the old furniture for pennies on the dollar to the resellers.
posted by soundguy99 at 3:30 PM on July 10, 2023 [5 favorites]


Aeron Musk
posted by chavenet at 4:28 PM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


The day my uni went into lockdown there was a queue of people piling office furniture into their cars or into taxis. I'm guessing not all of it came back. I'm absolutely certain everyone also had to spend their own funds at some point though.
posted by biffa at 4:35 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


I got 4 good chairs from my office, and some nice plates too.
Thanks!
posted by MtDewd at 5:04 PM on July 10, 2023


I know sometimes you got to bullshit to get the lede you want, but gotta love the only actually Aeron in the pictures is by itself, not on one the wrapped pallets, not getting crushed, and not in the pile waiting to get crushed. Likely because even on the used market, a no-frills Aeron goes for ~$700. Even if that did actually show up at the recycling place and it's not staged, someone likely pulled it aside because: ~$700

Hell, I'm sitting in one I paid $1600 for 5 years ago, and if I had to do it again I'd pay twice as much. It's a good chair, and the 8th hour of sitting in it on a given day is as comfortable as the first.

What's pictured are far cheaper chairs. I can't remember the manufacture, but my office in Boulder had a bunch of those, and they aren't in the same universe as a real Aeron as far as "sitting at your desk all day in comfort" goes. I also see some Eames Group Mid-back chairs that are certainly reproductions, because real ones of those are even more expensive than Aerons at like $3k each.

You do have to poke carefully through the enormous warehouse floor full of chairs to get ones that aren't busted in some fashion

Yeah, my childhood home of the 80s and 90s was furnished almost solely by stuff my dad took home after whatever software company he worked for went out of business, which happened every 3 years or so. Lots of stuff that started off pretty expensive was so beat to shit after 5 years of heavy office use that it probably should have gone to crushers instead of being my bookcase or computer desk or whatever. Lots of chairs that just ejected you backwards if you leaned back in any matter.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 5:09 PM on July 10, 2023 [11 favorites]


Everything that gets landfilled is something a consumer will have to purchase new. There are no useful incentives for re-use; capitalism abhors it.


Yeah, I dunno... Capitalism may abhor it. But used office furniture only works up consumers in rare instances. For every Aeron, you'll find dozens of Office Depot or particle board Ikea.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:14 PM on July 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


Immediately imagined an illustration of a sad office chair with huge eyes, looking wistfully out of the back of a truck bound for nowhere.
posted by amtho at 5:53 PM on July 10, 2023 [5 favorites]


Brave Little Office Toaster
posted by hippybear at 5:54 PM on July 10, 2023 [4 favorites]


...or some sort of "Office Space"/"Toy Story 3" mash-up that no one should ever watch.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:56 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


Office equipment you scarfed up included ...a painting of a monkey playing a banjo in my office.


Wait, wut?
That's absolutely awe-inspiring. If I were queen of the world, I would decree that every corporate office would be required to hang a MPAB framed next to the CEO portraits.
posted by BlueHorse at 5:56 PM on July 10, 2023 [10 favorites]


About 20 years ago, I was having a long random chat to a business owner that resold 'nearly new'office furniture. I'll call them Frank.

It was incredible. Big company departments who had extra budget left over towards the end of their financial year 'had to spend it otherwise their department budget was reduced accordingly the following year'.

So to spend the budget, they'd consistently just buy brand new office furniture, and then pay Frank to take away the 'old' stuff.

In some cases they'd be buying other companies discarded furniture from Frank as part of their refit.

It wouldn't surprise me if some of that furniture came from other departments at the same big company.

Kudos to Frank. Their company would be paid to take furniture away promptly, and then get paid again to deliver it elsewhere.

That was the day I realised a lot of large business practices were broken.
posted by many-things at 6:08 PM on July 10, 2023 [14 favorites]


Re: CEO
that reminds me of working at Oracle when they sent us posters from The Avengers which I guess was sponsored somehow by Oracle and we were supposed to put them up around the office. I noticed a resemblance between Iron Man and our CEO, so I cut out a picture of Ellison and put it on Iron Man’s body.
posted by MtDewd at 6:11 PM on July 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


A friend worked moving office furniture part-time before the pandemic for a company that cleans out offices of furniture when the occupants move on. They threw all of it away. Wasn't worth warehousing. He'd call me up about weekly asking if I wanted some of the stuff they were throwing away.
posted by 3.2.3 at 6:15 PM on July 10, 2023


I remember folks cackling over Aerons and Sumo Lounge beanbags they'd scored from closed offices in theWeb 1.0 crash ...
posted by scruss at 7:15 PM on July 10, 2023


I’ve often thought the local waste transfer station should have a re-use area where things can be left that others might want, free for the taking. It would cost the same as throwing them away, so as not to give people an incentive to leave actual garbage. After a few days unclaimed, the things would be bulldozed into the garbage heap.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 7:48 PM on July 10, 2023 [4 favorites]


Re: CEO
that reminds me of working at Oracle when they sent us posters from The Avengers which I guess was sponsored somehow by Oracle and we were supposed to put them up around the office. I noticed a resemblance between Iron Man and our CEO, so I cut out a picture of Ellison and put it on Iron Man’s body.
posted by MtDewd


I'm sure that would have made Larry's day, had he seen that on your wall. The marketing ties in were huge between Oracle and Iron Man (I may still have a copy of the Oracle magazine featuring the character). Not to mention Larry having a cameo in one of the movies. They played the similarities up SO hard, it would have been hard not to make the association.
posted by sardonyx at 7:48 PM on July 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


If you think about visions of the future from 50-60 years ago, it was disposable clothing and pills for meals... the ideal was you could just dispose of things and never have any clean-up in your life. That seems to have manifested in office furniture somehow.
posted by hippybear at 7:48 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


MtDewd, I worked at ATT during the DSL promo days... There were many posters around the large office asking "Have you tried ATT DSL?" Took an exacto knife and a few scraps and changed them all to "Have you tried ATT LSD?". Corporate life being corporate life, 4 years later when that office closed, nobody had noticed. Also on our primary conference room I mounted that hi gloss photo from despair.com "Meetings: because together we are dumber than we could ever be alone" something like that anyway. Again, 4 years in, nobody noticed. good times, I guess.
posted by jcworth at 7:48 PM on July 10, 2023 [8 favorites]


At my old job at an Ivy League university you know of, the facilities manager knew all the places to go to in the city that had the used Steelcase furniture. Stuff that would stop a tank in its tracks. Used, but cheap. He'd outfit the labs with it and everyone was happy. Used office furniture is a thing.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:53 PM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


> Let's not forget that a lot of office furniture is made by prisoners effectively as slave laborers. Even public universities are buying slave-made office furniture.

Can I get a citation? Not because I don't believe you, but I just want to learn more.
posted by Pitachu at 8:55 PM on July 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


That's absolutely awe-inspiring. If I were queen of the world, I would decree that every corporate office would be required to hang a MPAB framed next to the CEO portraits.

Oh, all of the years I worked in corporate finance I worked in offices that had wack-ass art like this. I mainly worked for UBS, and in one of their NYC office buildings they'd commissioned a different artist to do artworks in the elevator bays for each separate floor. I just remember one floor had a bunch of different lithographs of a stag, each one a different color. Another floor had photos - and the theme seemed to be "huge photos set in ruined buildings, with an animal standing in the foreground next to a white board with a random Latin phrase written on it." I also remember a lot of abstract works and maps.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:26 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


Here in Silicon Valley there are lots of small businesses that make a living off tech office furniture churn. These guys bid on auctions of used furniture, sort, clean, repair, store, and resell it. Look for ads in craigslist. The whole operation can be 2 guys, a box truck, and a warehouse.

Aerons and similar 1st- and 2nd-tier office chairs. Desks, lamps, reception desks, coffee tables, sofas, weird colorful statement pieces from some startup's lobby, etc.

Some pics from 2018.

None of the good stuff gets landfilled.
posted by ryanrs at 9:28 PM on July 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


When my company was still small and scrappy, they offered free art supplies and a canvas to all employees, if they had or knew any children that wanted to make some art. So we had framed artwork in the office that was just paint streaks or handprints, proudly labeled like so:

JOHN DOE (3 years old)
SON OF JANE DOE

Then after a few years, someone decided children's art didn't look "professional" and it was all replaced by generic rental art that no one would even notice.
posted by meowzilla at 9:50 PM on July 10, 2023 [7 favorites]


My company has finally decided on two days a week in the office going forward, with a hoteling system that reduces demand for desks and chairs. They recently posted effectively "Come and get it!" for their large stock of Aeron chairs, which I'm glad about. (I didn't get one as I already have a pretty good office chair situation, but many folks I know took advantage.)
posted by peacheater at 5:36 AM on July 11, 2023


Heck the chair I brought home is apparently an Aeron, and I didn’t even know it. Technically it’s not mine, it’s borrowed, and I might have to bring it back in some day, but really we all know no one at the office is ever asking for it back.

All I knew was that the one in my work office was comfortable enough that it’s followed me through 3 different desk locations, and protected from at least one effort to replace chairs with something clearly inferior. I have a screwy back, this chair keeps me happy. When I started working partly from home, the offer of a same-model chair for that space wasn’t one I could turn down.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:51 AM on July 11, 2023


Here's an article about universities and prison industries purchases. It's a broad overview but searching will yield a lot more about this.
posted by hippybear at 7:08 AM on July 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


During the original dot-com crash, in the late 90s, the comics strip Doonesbury had something about this. I remember Alex (although checking the internet tells me it's Zipper and Jeff Redfern), the daughter of the titular protagonist, creates a company, called eVulture. It was there to swoop in and pick over the bones of failed dot-com companies, purchasing their furniture and computers for dirt cheap and reselling it.
posted by Hactar at 12:56 PM on July 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


I also want to point out that when these outfits buy a set of chairs at auction, they generally get a bunch of the same model chair. So there is a cannibalization process where they strip the worst chairs for parts to fix up the others. This works because commercial office furniture is much better built than e.g. Ikea or Office Depot junk furniture.
posted by ryanrs at 7:37 PM on July 11, 2023 [3 favorites]


In 2020, I paid "an arm + leg" ($900 CAD w/tax) for a 15-year old Aeron chair from a local office supply store, it was 'refurbished' to 'like-new' condition.

It was/is... hands-down the best "for work" purchase that I have ever made (outside of a Brother MFC printer that was perfect for 7 years until Brother started messing-up the drivers/firmware).
posted by rozcakj at 10:32 AM on July 12, 2023


I’ve often thought the local waste transfer station should have a re-use area where things can be left that others might want, free for the taking.

My local dump has this feature. It's just... the edge of the dump. There's a sort of no-mans-land between the place you dump trash and the recycling bins that serves as a de facto "last chance" picking ground. Technically I guess you're not supposed to take stuff, and they won't let you in if you explicitly say that you're there to pick up rather than drop off (the usual hand-wavy "liability" excuse, which is as usual bullshit — it's most certainly that they don't want those people lousing up the dump; welcome to the South), but if you come in with a load, the staff don't give a shit if you leave with something else. They actually have a specific place where they pull bicycles out and leave them for the taking, and another for kids' toys (not, like, teddy bears, but mostly bigger outdoor stuff: playhouses, wagons, Cozy Coupes, etc.). Once I found a very nice bottle of wine in an old desk that was about to get crushed into incinerator fuel (I didn't tell my friends where I'd acquired it until after we'd all had a glass) and the guy driving the bulldozer had a good laugh when I waved and asked if he'd stop so I could get it from in front of him.

The only thing they won't let you take is scrap metal, presumably because that's valuable enough to be a profit center for the County. Everything else pretty much costs money to dispose of, so as far as the Solid Waste Department is concerned, you're just doing their job for them.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:17 PM on July 13, 2023


I purchased the Aeron I have at home from an office furniture chop shop I found on my local Craigslist. It felt like such a shady transaction - park on this street corner and text me, but it was completely legit. Got talking with the guy and he was connected to the film and TV production supply chain. A new TV show, film, production office would be like a new startup - everyone gets a fleet of new Aerons, furniture, etc. When production wraps, things in the clean up "just get taken care of." My Aeron was 80% off and came from a production office that was in business for 60 days. Great deal - I'm sitting in it as I type this.
posted by quartzcity at 12:23 PM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


I'm sure that would have made Larry's day, had he seen that on your wall.
I've not seen or paid attention to any Marvel movies, so I didn't know. I thought I was being subversive.

Also on our primary conference room I mounted that hi gloss photo from despair.com "Meetings: because together we are dumber than we could ever be alone"

I was in customer service and had one on my wall: "Customer Service... Because we're not happy until you're not happy!"
Also one I made myself, a picture of Lady Gaga singing "Stop calling, stop calling, I don't want to think any more."
posted by MtDewd at 11:30 AM on July 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


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