Office Furniture 101

Welcome to Office Furniture 101.  I’m your unaccredited professor, Tom.  In this article we are going to cover some basic office furniture shopping tips when surveying all of the options for office chairs in particular.  Let me give you a quick and easy laymans guide to identifying quality related to office chairs.  It rests in the office chair’s shipping weight.  When trying to compare one office chair with another, the layman’s way to identify which chair has better quality is to compare shipping weights.  This is because you can’t hide poor office furniture quality from the freight companies.  The heavier the item, the heavier the guage of steel that goes into the mechanism which is the foundation of the chair.  This weight rule is virtually fool proof for anything that you buy in the office furniture industry.

Occasionally, you may find an advancement in office furniture technology that might upset this rule.  For example, the 5 prong waffle PVC base  is much lighter than it’s dinosaur predecessor the welded metal base.  Most consumers are unaware that the polyethylene waffle base passes more stress tests than the old metal clad bases.  This is because the molecular bonding is through out the entire office furniture base rather than the strength being found at the weld points of the old metal bases. In this case, the lighter the base the better.

However, for the most part, check the shipping weights of the office chairs you are interested in.  Compare a professional dealers office chair to an office supply big box store office chair and you will see a world of difference.  When you think of what just a little bit more money will get you as far as quality it may makes sense to upgrade your office chair portion of your office furniture budget.  Remember, the office chair is the only piece of office furniture that can actually pay for itself in the first year through increased worker productivity.  As a business owner, you know you pay wages for those “employee stretches, body shifts, pauses to eleviate back pain” not to mention repetitive stress injury expense.

Don’t forget to test the office chair in the local office furniture dealer’s showroom.  If you go to a professional office furniture dealership, they will be able to fit the chair to you in the showroom with all of the adjustments, etc.   If not, and you are in the Austin, TX market call us and let us know 512-452-DESK, we’ll come to your site and adjust the office chair.