१० जुलै, २०२३
"At a Dumbo company warehouse recently in East Orange, N.J., on an industrial stretch opposite a cemetery..."
"... a crew of workers was preparing to jettison the last of a 9,500-pound office lot that a Brooklyn tech company had had in storage since April 2021.... [T]he client paid for the disposal of, among other things: 25 Herman Miller chairs; 20 computer monitor stands; 10 cubicle panels; nine boxes of carpet; and two flat-screen TVs.
'The amount of waste in this industry would boggle your mind,' said... the owner of... a refurbishing company and liquidator.... In a choppy motion, the mouth of the excavator swung over the half-ton pile of furniture and chomped down, contorting the chairs into a dangly metal cephalopod."
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New York Post article Canyon of Zeros
The zeros are in Albany
https://nypost.com/2023/07/09/lower-manhattan-office-rental-market-suffering-like-no-other/
Those Herman Miller chairs weren't cheap.
For decades (at minimum), the used office furniture market has been weak to nonexistent. There are stories of Silicon Valley companies calling the Salvation Army and Goodwill to donate worn-out stuff for the tax write offs. They were declined because there was no market for office furniture and the thrift shops had to pay big $$$$$ to send it off to the landfill.
So, the companies dumped their furniture in charity parking lots overnight...still saying they "donated" it...technically yes...
The blue states have many big cities and economies built around offices. The post-COVID remote work world made them dead men walking. Remote work is sticking. It's going to get worse.
In rural Ohio you just put it by the highway with a FREE sign on it. It's gone quickly.
How Politically Motivated Lockdowns Are Destroying the Planet
I'd have gladly picked up one or two of the Herman Miller chairs. I've been sitting in the same one since 2005 and have had to change out only the hard foam lumber support, which you can now get aftermarket on Amazon. What a waste.
what happens if nobody wants it? Can't you ask the same, about the entire city of NY?
This phenomenon of massive wastage of perfectly good office equipment is real, and widespread. It's a strange instance of market failure.
I am amazed, simply astounded and quite disturbed, that materials no longer needed at a business are, well, to put it politely, THROWN AWAY.
Well, after all, those landfills aren't gonna fill themselves. I have paid thousands upon thousands of dollars every year not only paying for waste disposal from construction sites, but collecting and binning perfectly good scraps of wood, wrapping material, cut scraps of plywood, cut up shingles, bits of wire, insulation, concrete, and perhaps most painfully, dog-ends of damnedly expensive wood trim. Every business has trash, defined as unusable material and items no longer needed that can't be used for another purpose.
Here's a real shocker: grocery stores throw out food!
The article is a lament on death of office work, not furniture.
I'm reminded of a website from the '90s (F***ed Company) that followed the implosion of investments in "Internet" companies. Seems like every new startup with a couple million bucks bought tons of office supplies, only to have to dump them when the money ran out.
Plus ca change.
Damn, there's probably some nice Herman Miller chairs being wiped out in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
I’m starting a GoFundMe for the new Save Orphaned Furniture (SOF). Please be generous.
I’m starting a GoFundMe for the new Save Orphaned Furniture (SOF). Please be generous.
I grew up in Detroit and spent my younger work years there. I saw the decline up close and in real time. I witnessed it go from the motor of the nation with the highest per capita income, to...well...a butt of jokes for comedians and bad movies for over 50 years now.
When I read of office space vacancies at the high levels they are now in our formerly greatest cities- New York, San Francisco, Chicago- as well as second tier cities with their downtowns blown up- Seattle, Portland, and others- I have to wonder if any of these will end up going "full Detroit" in a decade or so.
Who is going to come back and fill in these overpriced office spaces? And when the building owners turn them back over to the lending institutions, will they be dumped for pennies on the dollar? Will they simply try to convert them to condos to lure people back into the areas they just streamed out of? Or, will they try- as Gavin Newsom has- to fill them with the homeless that were previously living on the sidewalks outside of those very buildings, using the doorways as urinals?
At some point Detroit will come back. Never to the level it once was, but maybe as a mid-sized city that has learned a few lessons. They're nowhere close yet. But one can hope. As for our other great cities- I do think they've yet to learn the lessons of their hideous policies that led to this.
Anyway- a shame to just toss out all of that furniture, but I guess the banks could not be bothered with holding yet another auction.
Recessions happen when the economy grows in a direction that turns out to have been a dead end, and so a retreat is required; an orderly retreat is called a "soft landing," a rout is called a "depression."
It does make you wonder what will sustain that population as its economic center of gravity withers away. The ports? In places like Boston, the ports are being taken over by condos. First, they gutted flyover country, and sent the jobs to China, now NYC is finding out what being economically gutted is like. If history is a guide, the best bet is to buy real estate around the capital city, as the denizens of same ravage the countryside and bring the loot home with them. Like Paris and London, Washington, DC will inevitably become the economic center of the country.
Try disposing of a piano that isn't a Steinway.
The startup Beltway Bandit I worked for in the 80s just loved used office furniture. The building was well used, too, and film-developing chemicals and inadequate ventilation made people ill. Or was it stress?
"Try disposing of a piano that isn't a Steinway."
Yeah, we just paid $300 to get a piano taken away, and it's likely to be destroyed, though it looked great.
People still order Aeron chairs and pay something like $1,000, but they are getting destroyed in large tangled masses by the ton.
The enterprise of re-allocating them to people who could use them can't keep up with the need to clear them away and not buy storage, so they are destroyed.
I have a friend--now retired--who had a very nice business from 1980 to around 2005 "recycling" computer room floors. Those floors are raised about 12 inches or so above the actual building floor to allow cables to run under them. The flooring is modular--basically metal with industrial carpeting on top. When a company either closed or moved a computer center, the friend would buy the flooring, remove it and store it in his warehouse until some other company wanted to buy "used" computer room flooring for its new computer center.
Maybe the IRS should grab and warehouse all that office furniture to their new employees hired to snoop into everybody's business.
Put those Herman Miller chairs in server farms so people can see where their jobs went.
"Will they simply try to convert them to condos to lure people back into the areas they just streamed out of?"
Maybe they can become housing for "migrants".
Give hotels a chance to fix things.
Allow Inga to reduce the number of bunk beds.
"The enterprise of re-allocating them to people who could use them can't keep up with the need to clear them away and not buy storage, so they are destroyed."
If the people who could use them were willing to pay more for them, more of them would be saved.
Just a thought...
Blogger Temujin said...
"Damn, there's probably some nice Herman Miller chairs being wiped out in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco."
I've seen quite a few homeless skittering around downtown SF on office chairs in various stages of decay. Given that these things are exposed to the elements 24/7 They probably fall apart in record time. There's your market! The downside is you can't bring them on to a city bus.
Kind of surprised they couldn't find a way to sell them. I bought a refurbished Herman Miller Aeron for ~$700 in January for my personal computer desk. Completely worth it to save my back. Was not easy to find one cheaper that wasn't from an immensely sketchy website, and even those were over $500. You'd think there's a price point between that and mulching them that would turn a better profit. Perhaps not, logistics isn't easy
Considering the very real value they have on the used market, I'd be a little shocked if these were Aerons. Herman Miller make a huge range of chairs (the also make the Eames Lounge chair, and you can be sure that's not what was getting shredded).
"Considering the very real value they have on the used market, I'd be a little shocked if these were Aerons."
This article and this blog post were written to shock you.
The article begins: "Herman Miller is one of the most revered makers of office furniture in the world, its designs so esteemed that its Aeron chair, which became a fixture of New York City cubicles, was put in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. This month, some Herman Miller chairs, which can retail for over $1,000, met a less dignified fate: an appointment with the crushing metal jaws of an excavator."
What cemetery is opposite the storage facility in E Orange?
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