Why are good office chairs so expensive?

Depends what chairs you are talking about. I think there are about 5 different office chair markets. (I will try to refine this further, but this is broadly how I think about the market.)

Professional Grade: this is what high end big companies buy for their employees. (think Finance, Big Law, Advertising, Media, Consulting or many companies on the S&P 500 or the Russel 3000) Big firms are mostly only going to have the top-tier ergonomic chair manufacturers, such as Steelcase, Herman Miller, Knoll, Haworth, Teknion, Humanscale and their like. These types of firms budget well into $1000 range for ergonomic chairs.

2nd Tier Pro Grade: Plenty of big firms use chairs from Hon, Global, Sit On It, AIS, Allseating, and the like. These are mostly sold through dealers. Budget $400-700 per chair

Used, Pre-owned or refurbished of the professional grade brands. This industry is something like the old wild west, where anyone can be a player. Some dealers are great and some are not, so look for clues that the person you are dealing with has a good reputation. You can budget as little as $100 for a used Criterion or around $500-600 for a fully remanufactured Aeron.

"Cheap-o-rama" office chairs come from well-known stores such as the big Swedish house of Meatballs, Cardboard & Furniture, big Paperclips-R-Us and right on down the line. There's OK and less-than-OK, but there is an entire class, probably most of the office chairs produced that are bupkis in terms of design for ergonomics or durability. You can get cheap-o-rama for as little as $99 to as much as $400, and there are different levels of worse and better, but as they say, 'it is what it is' in this land.

SHINY! BLINGY!..."Cheap-o-Rama" - These are cheap chairs with a few more features that use big digital ad budgets to try and shine up the cheap with cool branding, flashy gaming logos, wiz-bang marketing and ultimately some meaningless fluff. These chairs will show a built-in footrest or advertise that they are for gamers. Mixed bag here. Mostly, this is a tad better than the cheap-o-rama, but the marketing and aesthetic design might be somewhat better. It's not really where we live, but to each their own.

Back to the original question: So why are good ergonomic chairs so expensive?

It might be because the companies that make them put a lot of money into R&D and the firms like Steelcase that build them will over-engineer the heck out of them and use lots of real materials like steel and higher-grade foams and fabrics.

We have sold used Steelcase chairs that are 40 years old and still in great working order. The only thing wrong with a 40 year old Criterion is the fabric is worn and maybe the gas cylinder needs to be replaced. Buying a chair that will last the 40 year duration of an entire career for $1000 is a reasonable price per year of use. Certainly better than the $100 you would have to spend every 12 months to replace a cheap broken chair from

Maybe shift the paradigm of what a chair “should” cost.

I submit that it is possible that $1000 is not expensive for an office chair, but that the $100 special from the meatball guys is just plain cheap. The cheap kind of chair uses cheap components where the main design consideration is: "What is the smallest box we can fit a chair in and what are the cheapest components we can use to make it not fall apart in the first few days of use?"

Why isn't there a good mid-range office chair?

Well, kind of there is, but it isn't at the price point you want. The AIS Devens is $400 bucks and so is the Sit-On-It Focus. These are perfectly good chairs. Not anywhere near the quality of a Steelcase Leap, but very good compared to the general home quality market.

There is a limited market for mid-market product. Most furniture buyers are looking for either the brand name $1000+ Leap or Aeron or they have a budget in mind around $100 because that is what they are used to seeing in the paperclip stores.

Here are some of my recommendations for best ergonomic office chair and here are a few factors you should consider more Important than choosing any specific task chair.

Joshua Bernstein sits on his Cobi chair and writes these little articles when the used office furniture business is sometimes slow because NYC is living through a big-ol global pandemic. If you have an opinion, shoot me a note, happy to hear your thoughts.