another thing to keep in mind is you can find used office furniture for a lot less than you might imagine. You can easily pick up a $800+ chair for your price range. Around here we have Storr which sells used office stuff.
Any tips for ways to find good used office furniture like this? I'd love to come across a used HM or something, but I have no idea how I'd even do that beyond dumb luck lol
I don't know how it works where you live but in UK/Ireland, the cheapest stuff is obtained through liquidator auctions. So you camp sites like this:
https://www.wilsonsauctions.com/upcoming-auctions?category=Liquidations-Disposals, find an auction you think will have some nice bargains, drive down to the listed address at the stated time and pay a deposit upfront (typically several hundred euros), then bid away. Don't find anything you want? Get your deposit back and you are only down petrol and an evening's worth of leisure time. Wherever you live, there has to be something similar. Companies go bust all the time.
Some websites/stores buy a bunch of stuff at liquidator auctions/police property disposals and then resell them used or refurbished at a markup (but still much less than new). I imagine this is where most people pick up their used office furniture.
If you cannot inspect an office chair before you pay for one, assume "used" really means "used". You will almost certainly need to clean or partially refurbish it yourself. You won't be able to tell how old or used the chair is from the pictures. People working in offices rarely treat their chairs/desks well because they didn't pay for them. Do not be surprised if you snag a used office chair and it has never been cleaned in 15 years. Do not be shocked when you run 10x dettox wipes over it and saturate every one of them with congealed dead skin, oil and cheeto dust from the previous century. On the flip-side, office chairs/desks are designed to withstand a decade of careless workers running them into the ground so they are built to withstand a lot of abuse. They are often modular and easy to user service.
Aerons:
I'm just going to blurt it out: Aerons are meme chairs (I'm sitting in one right now so I have embraced the meme). They are ubiquitous on the secondary market everywhere I've ever lived. Wherever there is cheap VC money, there are failed startups and invariably, a river of used Aerons. I can't say that about any other type of office chair, which don't find their way onto the secondary market in such consistently large quantities. I tried to find a used Steelcase Leap V1/V2 in Dublin, Ireland for years and they pretty much don't exist.
Aerons are not very adjustable and come in 3 sizes: A, B and C. A is for small people. C is for really big people. If you are a small person and you buy a C sized Aeron you will hate your life. The seat pan is bowl shaped and is not depth adjustable so forget about sitting in it cross legged or in whatever pretzel shape you curl yourself into when nobody is looking. There is one comfortable way to sit in an Aeron and that is upright with both feet planted on the ground. The reclining mechanism keeps the back and seat pan in an upright L shape and almost turns it into a rocking chair, except you can hold whatever degree of recline you want using your body weight and the tilt tension control. You also need to lean a little forwards/backwards to keep the rocking action going. If you like this, you will love a properly sized Aeron. Its basically like sitting on a trampoline that you can kick back and rock like a baby in a cradle. Chairs with depth adjustable seat pans usually don't do this. The reclining mechanism on the Leap V2 for example pushes the seat pan forward when you lean back on the back pan. This straightens your body out into more of a lying down position but you don't get your rocking chair action going on. You either love it or you don't care about it. If you don't care, there are other task chairs out there which are more adjustable than Aeron and better support more parts of your body as you move around. Herman Miller Embody is one of them.
Aeron's removable lumbar support is garbage. It works but the contour of it is all wrong so regardless of whether I use the thin or thick side, the bottom edge always digs into my lower back. I just set it all the way down so its close to my butt and when it grinds against the labels on my trousers/underpants too much, I just take it off completely (the lumbar support, not my trousers).
Aerons are built like tanks. The plastics and metals are rock hard and although they can scratch and gouge, 9 times out of 10 the chair will do more damage to wood and plastic furniture/fixings than they will do to the Aeron. Be careful wheeling it around and smashing into furniture. You will wreck your furniture.
Overall I think the Embody and Leap V2 are better ergonomic chairs with better back support. The arm rests are also better and more adjustable. The seat pan depth is adjustable on both if you have unusually short or long legs. You can sit comfortably in both chairs in a variety of different positions and both chairs adapt better to whatever position you choose to sit in. However, both of them are much less common on the secondary market. In some places they are pretty much non-existent so if you want one, you are looking at paying full price. The reason I have an Aeron is because I could find a fully loaded one easily for €200.00 and its good enough. My one is pre-2004 with the thumb wheel arm rests. When I got it, it was filthy. The gas lift was wobbly (a common issue in very old Aerons) and the foam insert under the seat pan had disintegrated into a black crumble. Also someone spilt some blue powder pigment on the seat pan and I could never fully remove all of it. 2x rounds of upholstery shampoo, steam cleaning, a new foam insert, new casters and a new gas lift and its almost as good as new:
https://imgur.com/a/l22DrHY
