>Somewhat probable: everyone in a department got upgraded, no exceptions. 'This is a really nice PC, but the boss says it has to go.'
Here in Europe all that is 100% resold either locally, or further to balkans/eastern-europe due to much lower purchasing power making the resale efforts of ~5 year old HW economically viable. I check the local "craigslist" often and I notice when a business is clearing house due to a flood of used HPs/Dells/Lenovos from a single user. However the list prices aren't remotely palpable to be good deals. I assume the person/business hired for clearing the house is marking them up significantly hoping to squeeze a big win from a mark.
Some of the tech companies I worked for here would first auction their older HW internally at every upgrade cycle to the employees before selling what was left to a clearing company, which makes me feel we're being robbed to be offered by employers to bid for their e-waste when in the US people find better stuff in the trash for free. Europoor indeed.
>otherwise reselling them might be good business
I assume those businesses don't bother reselling 1080p monitors and 2 year old PCs, and instead just throw them away, because the price of labor is so high in those parts of the US, that paying a full-time employee to take care of such resale tasks will cost them more money than they expect to make from the sale, so it's assumed to be cheaper and less hassle to just throw everything in the trash instead of wasting time on the used market dealing with tire-kickers just to gain what is essentially peanuts money for those businesses' bottom line.
Am I close with my assessment?
If an intern did it (or even a low paid full-time employee), one could easily turn a profit selling used equipment. (I work in the refurb department, reselling used stuff is literally my job!) 5 minutes per monitor @ $25/each = $300 per hour. You could sell to wholesalers for much less per unit, in exchange for not wasting time with random people.
I'm not sure how prevalent this practice is, but IT equipment is sometimes on a depreciation schedule. If an employee starts selling the company's PCs and monitors, an accountant will get very angry, because he told the government that the stuff is literally worthless, but it apparently isn't because it was sold for something. IANAL, but I'm fairly sure that's tax fraud. Once it's turned over to someone else (my company) for free, the valuation resets, or something.