Comment by tombert

I just bought a nearly-new used Herman Miller Aeron chair. It cost me $400, but if I had bought it new from their website it would have cost me ~$1600-1800.

It's a nice chair, but what I think what happens is that a company will buy a new nice chair for every employee, then do massive downsize and/or go bankrupt, and they liquidate these chairs for pennies on the dollar, oversaturating the market and making the chairs fairly cheap on the used market. It's no individual person's money, so they don't really care if they're taking a huge loss, and they might be able to write off a loss on taxes.

But it makes me think that if it's routinely easy to buy an $1800 chair for $400 because this is so common, maybe corporations aren't these hyper-optimized controllers of money.