Comment by PorciiVorbesc
5 hours ago
But why was the hospital throwing away what was essentially new high end systems that can run all the latest SW and operating systems? For what reason? It just makes no sense to me. Or am I too poor of a peasant to understand?
Are you by any chance in some super-rich part of the US? Because then no wonder your healthcare is so expensive when hospitals treat high end PCs as single use disposables. Here in Europe I sometimes see hospitals and doctors practices using 10+ year old PCs and still rocking the old 17-19 inch 1280x1024 CCFL LCD monitors from like the mid-2000s.
Regardless, I'd love to just run into high end PCs being thrown away here and pick them up for free, but where I live I see people barely throwing away their value-line Dell/HP Core 2 Duo towers with audacity to ask for 25+ Euros for their e-waste with the classic "no lowballs, I know what I got" attitude.
> For what reason? It just makes no sense to me. Or am I too poor of a peasant to understand?
I don't understand it either. Two scenarios make sense to me:
Somewhat probable: everyone in a department got upgraded, no exceptions. 'This is a really nice PC, but the boss says it has to go.' (There were about 100 i5 9th gen mini PCs (still OK), and 500 t640 thin clients in that same load.)
Less probable: some department got closed and cleaned out.
> Are you in some rich part of the US?
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Not particularly rich (rust belt), but healthcare is a significant part of the local economy. About 90% of healthcare here seems to run on HP, but Dells can appear.
> Here in Europe I sometimes see hospitals and doctors practices using 10+ year old PCs and still rocking the old 17-19 inch 1280x1024 CCFL LCD monitors from like the mid 2000s.
My stomach turns seeing the dozens of 24" probably 1080p monitors we scrap every day. Pretty much all are significantly scratched when they come off the truck, otherwise reselling them might be good business.
>Somewhat probable: everyone in a department got upgraded, no exceptions. 'This is a really nice PC, but the boss says it has to go.'
Here in Europe all that is 100% resold either locally, or further to balkans/eastern-europe due to much lower purchasing power making the resale efforts of ~5 year old HW economically viable. I check the local "craigslist" often and I notice when a business is clearing house due to a flood of used HPs/Dells/Lenovos from a single user. However the list prices aren't remotely palpable to be good deals. I assume the person/business hired for clearing the house is marking them up significantly hoping to squeeze a big win from a mark.
Some of the tech companies I worked for here would first auction their older HW internally at every upgrade cycle to the employees before selling what was left to a clearing company, which makes me feel we're being robbed to be offered by employers to bid for their e-waste when in the US people find better stuff in the trash for free. Europoor indeed.
>otherwise reselling them might be good business
I assume those businesses don't bother reselling 1080p monitors and 2 year old PCs, and instead just throw them away, because the price of labor is so high in those parts of the US, that paying a full-time employee to take care of such resale tasks will cost them more money than they expect to make from the sale, so it's assumed to be cheaper and less hassle to just throw everything in the trash instead of wasting time on the used market dealing with tire-kickers just to gain what is essentially peanuts money for those businesses' bottom line.
Am I close with my assessment?
If an intern did it (or even a low paid full-time employee), one could easily turn a profit selling used equipment. (I work in the refurb department, reselling used stuff is literally my job!) 5 minutes per monitor @ $25/each = $300 per hour. You could sell to wholesalers for much less per unit, in exchange for not wasting time with random people.
I'm not sure how prevalent this practice is, but IT equipment is sometimes on a depreciation schedule. If an employee starts selling the company's PCs and monitors, an accountant will get very angry, because he told the government that the stuff is literally worthless, but it apparently isn't because it was sold for something. IANAL, but I'm fairly sure that's tax fraud. Once it's turned over to someone else (my company) for free, the valuation resets, or something.