Justifying an Expensive Quality Computer Chair
About one year ago, I was introduced to the Herman Miller Aeron chair. For anyone not familiar with it, it’s a chair that is said to have grossed over $1 billion in sales and is considered by many to be one of the most comfortable ergonomic chairs on the planet. According to Internet folk lore, it’s mandatory that I at this point include the phrase “dot com excess” in my post about the Aeron chair, and mention that it was hugely popular among high-tech start-ups, right before reality set in and the bubble burst. So why the hell am I crapping on about a chair? Well, it’s the price. Or perhaps more importantly, why I think it’s perfectly justifiable for basically any full-time programmer.
Here in Australia, a fully loaded Aeron, shipped to your door, will set you back around $1600 AUD (~$1300 USD). Most people completely rule out any possibility of owning a chair like the Aeron after hearing a price tag like this. I suspect that like most things in life, it’s the upfront cost that deters people the most. Like any other investment, buying an expensive chair requires that you postpone consumption now for greater consumption in the future. The chair of course pays out its dividends daily, but unless you’ve been sitting on a steel rod up until now, it’s unlikely to make you $1600 better off in 24 hours.
I finally bit the bullet and bought myself an Aeron chair at the beginning of this year. Retrospecting all the way back to my last sentence, “bit the bullet” is a little melodramatic – buying an Aeron was a complete no-brainer. When you spend around 10 hours a day at the computer, $1600 amortised over the life of a chair doesn’t look so bad. Speaking of the life of a chair, the Aeron comes with a 12 year warranty. I don’t think any of my other possessions will still be under warranty by the time I’m 33 years old.
So justifying an expensive computer chair for myself was easy – it brings me comfort and satisfaction every single day, for many hours a day. It’s likely to do so for quite some time. But it did get me thinking; how justifiable is an expensive computer chair at work? All the work I do at the moment is from home, so it’s not like I have to seek approval to buy furniture here. Between me, myself and I, things get approved fast. They’ll almost certainly be a point in time though where I’m working in an office, at which point I’ll want to be able to determine a) whether or not an expensive computer chair is justifiable and b) how I’d go about proving it. So I came up with a hypothetical scenario of a full-time worker. Here’s how it goes:
Scenario
You’re a full-time worker, working 40 hours a week over 5 days. Without subtracting days off, you therefore work 260 days a year (52 weeks * 5 days). You get 4 weeks annual leave (4 weeks * 5 days = 20 days), 11 public holidays and take 5 sick days in a year, for a total of 36 additional days off. This means you actually work 260 – 36 = 224 days a year (less than it feels like I’m sure). Over a 12 year period (warranty of chair), you work 2688 days (12 years * 224 days). In true business style, let’s break it down, cost/benefit.
Cost
Ok. So your company spends $1500 AUD on buying you an Aeron (assuming they get it $100 cheaper by being a business or buying in bulk). Let’s assume they would have otherwise bought you a $200 chair, so the additional cost to them is $1300. Now at this point it’s attractive to say “so it’s costing the company $1300″. To be fair though, there is a hidden cost – the opportunity cost.
The opportunity cost is the next best option the company would have to forego to buy you a quality computer chair. Unless they were really bad with finances, they wouldn’t just leave the money sit there doing nothing if they didn’t buy you a quality chair; they’d have it earning interest or being invested in some other productive activity. To keep things simple, let’s assume their best alternate use of the money is to invest it into an index fund, with a long-term compounded rate of return of 10% annually. Also assume long-term inflation of 2.5% per/year, calling it even at 7.5% interest per year. $1300 compounding for 12 years at 7.5% comes out to $3096.31, which is the opportunity cost of buying you a quality computer chair.
So at this point, the company has two options:
- invest their $1300 in the index fund and come out with $3096.31 in 12 years time, measured in today’s dollars.
- invest $1300 in an expensive chair for you in anticipation that it results in an additional $3096.31 of production/saving or more over 12 years.
Squeezing $3096.31 of value out of a quality chair upgrade sounds a little lofty at first. But let’s not forget, this is over 12 years. Another way to view the cost of a quality chair is to look at it amortised over the 2688 days you work over those 12 years. $3096.31/2688 days = $1.15 AUD (~ $0.95 USD) per day in order for you to sit in a fancy pants chair. So $1.15 AUD per day, or $257.60 AUD a year ($1.15 * 224 days), is the price a business pays to notably improve your seating. If you earn $50,000 per year, that’s equivalent to asking for a one half of one percent pay rise. It becomes an even smaller percentage of your income as time goes by and your pay increases.
But hold on you say; an employee will rarely stick with a single company for 12 years, and the company might not even exist for that long. A counterargument to the former is that the chair would be transferred over to the person replacing them. To the latter I’d say that high quality chairs like the Aeron appear to hold their value fairly well and so some of the cost would be recouped when the chair is liquidated. The precise figures I’ve used in this example are also debatable and you could tweak them for better or worse to calculate your own situation. Either way, I like to think the provided scenario is indicative of the kind of money it costs a company to provide employees with a high quality chair. And now to the benefit…
Benefit
It’s really hard to put a dollars and cents figure on the benefit of a quality chair, but here’s what I imagine would be some of the benefits for a company:
- Greater productivity: now you can focus on your work, rather than how sore your arse is getting.
- Higher morale: you’re left believing that your employer cares about you (even if they don’t).
- Lower turnover: see higher morale.
- Fewer sick days: fewer mangled spines means fewer sick days (and fewer law suits).
- Attract new employees: nothing speaks geek like an Aeron chair. If I were to walk into a job interview and they sat me down in an Aeron or similar, I’d have more respect for the company and be under the impression that they treat their people well.
At $1.15 a day, your employer could easily be spending more money providing you with cups of coffee and biscuits than with a quality computer chair. I’m going to argue that if you’re a full-time programmer, it’s not over indulgent or opulent for a company to buy you an expensive quality computer chair – it’s a sound investment. You shouldn’t have to be a freakin’ genius programmer earning a 6 figure salary before it becomes justifiable either. The benefits might not be 100% quantifiable, but I think if you achieve even one of those listed above, a quality chair will pay for itself over its lifetime. Does your job justify a chair upgrade?
Note: If you’re living in the United States, consider yourself lucky. High quality computer chairs like the Aeron can be picked up for notably less than they can here in Australia, making them even easier to justify on a cost/benefit basis.