If you cruise the hot deals forums, sub-$100 and sub-$50 office chairs come up all the time. They don't compare to Aerons, but they're really cheap.

Try browsing/searching www.fatwallet.com and http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.aspx?catid=40&for...

Craigslist, though it may take a little while. I spent our first to weeks in CA in a wood chair at a very tall kitchen table. But we soon found a guy getting rid of 40 chairs and we got 4 for $6 a piece.

Don't you have better things to do with your time than to hunt for $6 chairs on craigslist?

Being frugal is one thing. Assigning an absurdly low valuation to your time is quite another.

office depot, we got designated 'heavy use' (8 hours a day) chairs for about $120-$140.

Well worth it.

Those only last about 6 months. At least for me, I began having horrible back pain from mine. After a couple of tries at those chairs, I replaced it with a used Aeron ($460 at the Arthur Anderson auction...I wanted to bid on shredders, too, but my dad wisely noted that the ones at Arthur Anderson were "all used up"), which I've had for years and the only thing that's any different about it is the lumbar support bar has split some. Still pretty comfortable, and I don't have any back problems with it, despite hours sitting every day (though I do break it up with at least a few walks a day...one for lunch, one for the dog, and one for some random trip to the library or Asian market or bubble tea shop).

Interestingly, at the same time, I also bought a Keilhauer chair for $30 in "dirty" condition. A good cleaning, and it's a really comfortable $750 chair for practically nothing. Everybody was focused on the Aerons, so all of the other office chairs went really cheap.

I know used furniture stores are a lot less likely to let things go cheap than an auction (and Arthur Anderson only goes out of business once), but it's worth noting that if I'd had to buy a new Office Depot chair every year, I would have spent more than even a new low end Aeron by now and my back would probably be in worse shape (and I can't buy a new one of those). That's not to say Aeron is the be all, end all. Steelcase Leap is a great chair, too. And the afore-mentioned Keilhauer makes really good chairs that hold up for years, and because they're less well-known and don't look as impressive you might be able to find a bargain.