Wednesday, June 22, 2005

For a number of weeks now I've been building up to buying a new chair to go in the office. I bought the chair that I sit on each and every day at home ten years ago for £15 from one of the hundreds of dodgy secondhand stores that clutter the infamous student ghetto known as Narborough Road in Leicester.

That chair has served me well but after ten years it has reached the end of its useful life; the dubiously coloured fabric has ripped and the yellowing foam inside is gradually spreading through the house as more and more of it escapes (deliberately assisted, I think, by the cats when I'm not looking).

For once eBay couldn't help me in my quest (It is, as far as i'm aware, impossible to test a chair out online. Let's face it the one thing you want to do with a chair before you buy is park yer arse in it for a few minutes to see if it's comfy.) so I scooted off to my local stationery superdupermegastore to have a look.

It appears that unless you spend hundreds on the latest mega-adjustable, spine massaging, robot designed contraption you're pretty limited in choice: You can either have the cheap 'you'll be hospitalised by Christmas' ones or one of the slightly more expensive 'executive' ones made from the poorest quality leather.

After giving the chairs some serious bum action for a couple of minutes I'd got my choice down to one of two possible 'executive' chairs: a £60 which was pretty comfy but the leather had the feeling of a pensioner's skin after years of sunbathing at a Malaga retirement complex, and one that was 25 quid more but actually felt like a cow had been involved in its creation.

I decided that £85 was a lot to spend on a chair and was just about to ask a passing sales assistant to get me the cheaper option when he plucked the price tag off of the chair and replaced it with a new one. Suddenly the price of my cheaper option had gone up to £80. He promised that none of the other chairs were likely to shoot up in price during the next five minutes.

With five quid in it I opted for the more expensive of the two chairs, after all it was much more comfy. My price-hiking friend the sales assistance got me my chair and carried it to the checkout (possibly to prevent someone raising the price before we got there). The till operator, who was at least 10, scanned the box and the price came up: £115. £20 had almost magically been added to my chair in the 30 seconds it had taken me to get to the tills. A few choice words were shared and as if by magic the chair returned (albeit for this transaction only) to £85.

Posted by Antz at 9:29 AM | Permalink | | |

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