Used restaurant furniture is nearly impossible to find. If you need 40 used restaurant chairs, you'll be able to find 26. If you need 88 used restaurant bar stools, you will find 50 in red and 50 in black. Not quite what you wanted but you can make do.
When you go to see how much the used restaurant furniture costs it still seems like a pretty good deal. Then you go for the shipping. Whoa!! It cost $1500 to ship $700 worth of used furniture. You have no idea if the furniture is usable or stable. You have no warranty and you are about to open a restaurant. Do you really want to trust your guest's comfort to something you found on Etsy?
You have two options, you can buy really inexpensive furniture from websites like restaurantfurniture4less.com and webstaurantstore.com. You should be able to find better quality and probably less expensive than used and definitely much safe. You might not be able to get exactly what you like but it will be close and it will be pretty cheap and the quality will be good enough.
Your last option is to buy custom furniture from a company like Richardson Seating. We carry a lot of the same products that you will find on the less expensive websites but we make our furniture in Chicago. All upholstery work will be done with high quality Naugahyde upholstery and we use American made foam. We can do wood seats or upholstered seats. You can get it exactly the way you want and you can get a sturdier version.
If you are looking to make a statement, used restaurant furniture is going to be hard to come by. Rather than take the risk of using cheap chairs and cheap bar stools, you can buy our furniture and it looks like it was made 40 years ago. People may assume you bought your new restaurant bar stools used just because they will be surprised some of our styles still exist.
What makes Richardson Seating's furniture look like great vintage used furniture is that we take a long time to hand upholster each seat. While most companies have looked for ways to make more bar stools and do it in less time, we have continued to make our products the exact same way with a few improvements here and there.
You can find our bar stools selling used quite often. If made in the correct vinyl, our bar stools and chairs can last decades. The most important decision when deciding to make new bar stools or even if you are reupholstering used bar stools is to use good vinyl. Some vinyl says it can handle 20,000 rubs and some vinyl says that it can handle 2 million double rubs. I tend to like the 2 million double rub type of stuff.
When you use high quality parts and most importantly high quality vinyl you know you will see your products being used a second and third time. Reupholsters definitely can tell our work. We use at least 5 times as many staples as we should. It is super time consuming to remove them and turn our products into used restaurant furniture and give them a second life.