The cupboard
What a cupboard costs
The record has no prices, so it cannot answer this in money. Four things it can say about cost, and one it cannot.
This record contains no prices. Not one object has a value attached, by design, for the reasons set out on the method page.
So the question of what eighty-six unused objects cost cannot be answered here in money, and no page on this site will attempt it. An inventory shows what equipment exists, but not how work moves around it; teams can check what information the tool can provide before deciding which time and project signals belong in a limited pilot.
Four things can be said without a price. Another useful source on technology, maintenance or purchasing is EPEAT.
1. Space, in nineteen objects
Eleven screens and stands, four chairs, four storage units.
Those nineteen are the ones with a footprint. The other sixty-seven intact items — cables, adapters, input devices, lamps, headsets — occupy drawers and boxes, and in no account did anybody describe them as taking up room.
Eleven workplaces, nineteen objects that occupy floor or shelf space and do nothing. Under two per workplace.
That is a smaller cost than the count of eighty-six suggests, and it is the first thing a reader who sees the big number should know.
2. Purchases avoided, in four objects
Four cable failures were covered by spares from storage.
That is four things not bought. The record cannot say what they would have cost, and the saving is real whatever the figure, because the alternative to having a spare cable is obtaining a cable.
Four, out of twenty-one cables held. The other seventeen have so far covered nothing.
3. Searching, which the record cannot measure
Four adapters in the cupboard could not be identified by their owners.
An unlabelled store is a store you have to search, and a store you have to search is one you stop searching. This is the most plausible mechanism by which the cupboard's own size reduces its usefulness, and the record has no field that captures it.
Two accounts mentioned not knowing what was in the cupboard. Neither was asked for consistently, so neither is counted.
4. Replacement, in an unknown number of objects
Somewhere in the record there is probably an object that was bought while an equivalent sat unused in the same building.
The record cannot find it, because objects are recorded by kind and not by specification, so two items both called input device might be interchangeable or might not.
Three workplaces volunteered that this had happened at least once. The record counts it as zero, because it was not asked, and names it here as a known gap.
What cannot be said at all
Whether the cupboard is expensive. No prices, so no total, and no total means no comparison against anything.
Whether keeping was cheaper than disposing. Disposal has costs too — time, transport, in some cases a fee for electrical equipment — and none of them is recorded.
Whether any of it was a mistake. That would require knowing what each object cost, what it would have been worth when it stopped being used, and what happened to that value since. The record knows none of those.
A record with prices in it would be able to answer the question this page asks. It would also, inevitably, have become a record about what to buy.
That is the trade the method made, stated plainly: the inventory gave up the ability to cost anything in exchange for not becoming a recommendation. This page is where the cost of that trade shows.
The one figure that does the work
Twenty-seven objects are in cupboards because something better arrived and the old one was not dealt with.
Whatever the money involved, that is a third of the whole cupboard traceable to a single moment of non-action, repeated twenty-seven times across eleven workplaces.
If any figure in this section is worth carrying away, it is that one, because it is the only one that identifies a mechanism rather than a quantity. The quantities are all conditional on eleven places and cannot be transferred. The mechanism — a replacement arrives, the original survives, nobody decides — is the kind of thing that might hold elsewhere, and this record cannot test whether it does.
5. The searching, counted where it can be
The record cannot measure the cost of searching an unlabelled store, but it can count one consequence.
Fourteen input devices are in drawers across eleven workplaces. Five input devices broke during the period the record covers. In none of those five cases did anybody take a spare out of a drawer: three were thrown out and replaced, two are broken and kept.
Fourteen available substitutes, five occasions to use one, no uses.
The same holds for nine lamps, eight audio items and seven storage objects: not one of those has ever come back into service. The only category where storage ever supplied anything was cables, four times out of twenty-one held.
So of the seventy-eight intact stored objects, the number that has ever proved useful is six, and seventy-two have not. Whatever a cupboard costs, that is the denominator the cost sits against.
Why the sixty-seven small ones are the awkward case
Nineteen stored objects have a footprint. The other sixty-seven are in drawers and boxes and nobody in eleven workplaces described them as a problem.
That is what makes them hard to account for in either direction. They cost nothing visible to keep, which defeats the waste reading. They also supply almost nothing, which defeats the prudence reading. They simply accumulate, invisibly, at a rate nobody notices and to no particular effect.
A record with prices would at least be able to say what that accumulation represents. This one can only say that in eleven workplaces it reached sixty-seven objects and nobody had thought about it until the inventory.
What this page is not
It is not an argument for clearing out a cupboard, or for keeping one.
The next page sets out both readings of seventy-eight and declines to choose between them, and this page is the groundwork for that: the accounting that would settle it does not exist in this record and could not have been collected without changing what the record is.