Aerons are about $400 used, last forever, and you can get $400 for it again if you want to sell it. Their utility as a symbol of excess and financial mismanagement died out in the previous dot-com bust. In fact, now that servers are cheap, you might as well spend your money on nice chairs and desks - at least they last forever.
The new metric for startup waste is the amount of time founders and their employees spend on social networking sites. If your CEO is averaging 50 TWEETS per day, you're fucked.
When I was buying them in Austin a couple years back, I found they were about $600-$700 from used office furniture stores, though occasionally they'd show up on Craigslist for less. I bought the one I still have from the Arthur Andersen auction after the Enron scandal shut them down...got it for $385. I also got a truly awesome Keilhauer chair for $35 (list price ~$950, but everybody was after the Aerons, so the other chairs went for nothing, even though most were really nice chairs), which I also kept. Maybe Aerons come down in price in the past two years, or are cheaper here in the valley, I dunno.
But I agree, spending a few grand on every new employee for a nice working environment, the keyboard they like, a great chair, a good desk, a nice top of the line computer with dual monitors, is just sound business sense. The money spent will disappear into noise by the time you add their annual salary to their line on your expense report. And the work environment will last for years, just upgrade the computer every 18-24 months, and the monitors every 3 years, and you've got a fat and sassy employee that feels like you appreciate them (assuming you actually do appreciate them and treat them with respect in addition to giving them great tools with which to work). And the chair is the single most important part of that equation. I'd never ask anyone to sit 8 hours in a crappy chair.
You jest, but I would seriously consider spending (my own) money on such a thing. Poor ergonomics can result in skeletal, muscular, and tendon stress injuries. I have yet to find a chair or desk that really suit my shape and posture, and the aching back I have at the end of the week is becoming more and more of a concern as time goes on.
Plus, if your startup fails, you can wheel your Aeron chair out of the door as a severance package while Michael Arrington flings mendacious personal attacks at you on TechCrunch with gleeful schadenfreude.
Supposedly Aeron chairs don't depreciate much over time. You could sell the chairs and even get most of your money back! I recall reading somewhere that the Aeron chairs companies bought during the big bubble were their most valuable assets when they went under.
They're like cars -- they depreciate a great deal as soon as you drive them off the lot, but then depreciation slows considerably. If you buy a used one and keep it in good condition, it probably won't depreciate hardly at all.
