Coronapanic shut down America’s offices. It seems that a lot of us aren’t going back to work in the office or back to work ever. BLS:
If office buildings are turned into warehouses, apartments, etc., what happens to all of the Herman Miller and Steelcase high-end desk chairs? Unlike anything from IKEA, the $1,000 Leap v2.0 chair from Steelcase seems to be readily available as an “open box” item from Madison Seating (they fell off the back of a truck?). New chairs are also available at Amazon. In a world where nothing is in stock, this suggests that there is a glut of ergonomic chairs.
Wirecutter’s best office chair for 2022, the Steelcase Gesture, is also in stock at Amazon. Ditto for their budget pick, the HON Ignition 2.0.
Could there be a business in exporting all of our high-end office chairs to countries where people still work in-person, e.g., China?
People are still going to work and are just taking those chairs home. Also, many companies are preserving their offices and the chairs are still there, just unused.
Perhaps related, an article about the proposed Mutual of Omaha building, which will only concurrently house 2500 of the company’s 4000 area workers: https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=19847
The lion kingdom’s day job furniture is probably going to landfill. No-one within driving distance has enough room for it. The lion kingdom has pondered maybe using the standing desk electronicals as table legs.
There is a strange irony in how several lion day jobs have done on-site work overseas & work that could be done remotely in the US office.
It’s always fun to watch corporate and government auction sites if you need something along those lines…of course, anyone corporate would presumably take the “cream” and do the most advantageous thing with it, but not necessarily. Bargains can be found!