Monday, August 25, 2014

Flipping Herman Millers

I was one of those dot.com boom excitables who decided that he must own a Herman Miller Aeron chair in order to be super cool and incredibly productive while I blogged and tweeted (well, I don't think there was Twitter back then) and so forth.

Soon after I got the chair, I realized that I really didn't like it very much at all. It didn't seem to provide support in the right places, didn't make it easy to avoid slouching....it wasn't the desk chair for me.

[My chair of choice, for years now, is the Swopper.]

Tried to get my son interested. Nope.

Tried to get my wife interested. Nope.

Moved it to the garage. 

Finally decided to offer it up on Craigslist nice and cheap to make it go away. Posted the ad for $200 and within minutes had someone lined up. He lived in St. Louis, but his dad lived nearby, and he told me when picking up the chair:

His son has built up a business "flipping" Aeron chairs. Buy them cheap, buy lots of parts, fix 'em up, and spin 'em back out into the market. 

Who knew?

What a remarkable system is capitalism. Sure, it's not nice. It's not fair. It's played a key role in the destruction of our planet as humans suck out the "natural resources" to make all the stuff that consumers want to buy. 

But capitalism is a very organic way of organizing an economy. 

Oh and this same chair-flipping fellow also does a wholesale business in ugly Christmas sweaters.

Finger on the pulse of a nation.

1 comment:

Kim Berg Hansen said...

+1 on Swopper - the last 7 years I've had one at work and one at home. Indispensable ;-)