Subject: Re: How the mighty can fall
Same thing in the office furniture business.
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During my tenure of business ownership I had the dubious pleasure of moving them three times.

At the first location, the office furniture would today be deemed antique (a roll-top desk, some oak display cases which were refugees from some general store, etc.), but back then were deemed junk. When we moved to the next location, that "old wood crap" was trashed and we bought modern wood-grain Formica topped desks with chrome-plated legs - the sort Staples might sell today. We tossed the 1.5 ton "walk-in" railroad safe for a more petit Mosler and so on. That stuff survived the next move.

Then came the discussion with the moving company for our next move. He quoted a price and then made a pitch if we needed any upscale Steelcase furniture (in pristine near-new condition) where a desk and return would cost $115 delivered (it seems that when large firms moved in NYC, they bought new furniture for the new location and gave the "old" stuff to moving companies for free in order to turn over an empty floor to the old landlord. He also pitched me on crushing any old furniture we had at $5 each. I asked him how much he was charging to move each of my desks and he said $95. When I ask if that meant that for $20 a piece I could ditch all my old furniture and have him deliver far better pieces in newer condition, he pause for a moment absorbing what he had just done, looked a bit crestfallen and said, I guess you could do that - so that's what I did. At the same time, I bought a load of five-drawer Steelcase filing cabinets as well as a bunch of lateral files at $25 each.

When I sold my business, the guys who bought it didn't want any of my "old" furniture and, instead, bought a bunch of cheat Formica topped desks with chrome legs for their new place. I had the principal from the high school I attended send someone down to tell me what they wanted of the 18,000 square feet of tools, material and furniture. They sent about a dozen kids, and a shop teacher, rented a huge box truck and ended up filling it 14 times over the next week or so. The last couple of loads included the filing cabinets as the principal, without counting how many I had, said "and while you are at it, send me any filing cabinets you have". He should have been careful what he wished for :-). Besides those, they ended up with a complete CNC machine shop, and a massive amount of tooling ranging from diamond core drilling rigs to fiber optics test equipment.

Fortunately, the school had a vacant former machine shop room, on the first floor, measuring about 40 feet by 100 feet that this stuff went into until they could disperse their loot throughout the massive building (my high school took up 2/3 of a city block and was ten stories high).

Jeff