Bought second-hand: thirty-one

The figures

still in use              16   (52%)
kept, out of use           9   (29%)
gone from the room         6   (19%)

Nineteen per cent gone is the third highest in the record, behind gifts and unknown origins. When equipment use and project effort are reviewed together, managers can tracked effort across distributed projects and define the purpose, access rules and review date before collecting anything.

What gets bought used

Chairs and desks, mostly. Eleven of the thirty-one are large furniture, against eight of ninety-six in the bought-new group — four times the share. For independent context beyond these eleven workplaces, review material from TechRepublic.

That is the pattern anybody would predict: large furniture is expensive new, holds its usefulness, and has a visible second-hand market. Small electronics do not.

Why the survival gap is probably not about quality

A second-hand object arrives with a life already behind it.

The record knows when each item arrived at this desk, and does not know when it was made. A second-hand chair bought in 2019 might be four years old or fourteen, and nothing in the inventory can say which.

So the five-point gap between fifty-two and fifty-seven per cent has at least three candidate explanations and the record cannot choose:

1. Age. Second-hand things are older, and older things stop being used more often. Almost certainly part of it.
2. Fit. A second-hand purchase is constrained by what is available, so the match to what somebody wanted is looser.
3. Nothing. Five points on thirty-one items is two objects. Two objects is noise.

The third is the honest first answer. Thirty-one is a small number and the comparison is between 16/31 and 57/96.

The chairs

Five of the thirty-one are chairs, and chairs are worth isolating because they are the object the whole discussion of desk equipment tends to revolve around.

Of the five: three still in use, one kept, one gone. Sixty per cent surviving, which is better than chairs overall in the record, where eleven of twenty are in use.

Five observations. It means nothing on its own and it is printed because leaving it out while printing the less favourable figures above would be a selection.

What the second-hand group says about the record's method

It exposes the limit of recording origin rather than age.

Origin tells you how the object got to this desk. For six of the seven origins that is also roughly when the object entered service. For this one it is not, and the record silently treats a four-year-old chair and a fourteen-year-old chair as the same entry if they arrived in the same year.

A better inventory would ask for manufacture year or an estimate. It was not asked because most people do not know it for most objects, and a field that produces mostly blanks and guesses is worse than no field.

The one group where age matters most is the one group where age is least knowable.

What the second-hand group shares with the bought-new group

One thing, and it is the point of keeping them in the same half of the record: somebody looked at the object, decided, and paid.

That is true of all hundred and twenty-seven chosen items and of none of the hundred and fifty-seven others, and it is the only property the origin field was built to capture.

Everything else about the two groups differs. The second-hand group is weighted towards large furniture — eleven of thirty-one against eight of ninety-six — and the bought-new group towards lamps and small things. The second-hand group arrives with an unknown amount of life already spent.

Why the record keeps them apart anyway

Because the thing that is unknown is different.

For a bought-new object, the arrival year is also roughly the year the object entered service, so the age figures mean what they say. For a second-hand object the arrival year says only when it reached this desk, and the record's median age of six years for things in use is, for these thirty-one, a measurement of tenure rather than of age.

Sixteen of the thirty-one are in use. How old they actually are is the one quantity this inventory cannot even bound, and merging them into the bought-new group would have hidden that in a figure of a hundred and twenty-seven.

The six that left

Six second-hand items are gone from the room. Four were sold or given on, two were disposed of.

That four of six went on to somebody else rather than into a bin is the highest such ratio of any origin, and it is probably the simplest finding in this section: a thing bought on a second-hand market is a thing whose owner already knows that market exists.

Six items. A tendency, not a result, and the page on what the record refuses explains why nothing of this size is allowed to become a claim.