At least, until I found something I liked. I purchased a Purple 3, thinking that if I loved it, I'd just stick with it. I did love it, but I couldn't justify spending $2k on a twin(!). I returned it, and purchased from another company for ~$700. I didn't like it as much as the Purple, but when I went to begin the return, I was told that there was no return process, and that I could "move the mattress to a different room, or donate it." Two days later, I received a refund for the full purchase amount. That ended my journey; no awesome mattress at any price beats "decent and free."
As much as I appreciate getting a new mattress for zilch, the experience made me extremely wary. Was my mattress so cheaply-made that the manufacturer could afford to give them away? What was up? So I did some research. It turns out that the mattress industry is a racket. The markups are ludicrous; almost every mattress on the market costs, at most, a few hundred dollars to make. And then it's also impossible to comparison shop because "models" differ based on retailer by one or two small features; that means no price-matching, if you can even tell what you're buying.
These are the kinds of things that make people suspicious of the way the economy is set up. It should be easy to find out what you're purchasing, and then to pay a fair price for it. Instead you have entire manufacturing-retail chains built on obfuscation and able to eat untold amounts in lost product.
I didn’t read the article but I’ve worked for one of these companies that was a startup and have a local mattress company as a client. So a little perspective.
These companies are all marketing companies. There is no “science” they literally get rolls of foam from foam makers, throw them on in layers and try to find the right combo. I was there, I’ve done it myself.
The companies that end up winning have fantastic marketing, like purple, or were early, like Casper.
Markup for foam mattresses in general is close to 2000%. Average foam cost for a king mattress was <$50. The old school mattress companies are close to The same which is why they have stores on every corner.
The industry is dirty as hell and as cut throat as they come.
As far as the returns, a reputable company will send the Salvation Army or local equivalent to pick up the mattress and it becomes a tax write off for the company. Otherwise like others have said they will tell you to keep it. No sense bringing it back to the warehouse and in a lot of places it is illegal to resell a mattress.
Indeed. And on top of those hundreds of marketing companies pretending to be mattress companies is the even weirder world of online mattress reviewers, who are all ensnared in a tangle of kickbacks and referrer fees and endorsements. Fast Company had a great piece on it a few years ago if you want a taste:
COGS for Casper is ~50%, which doesn't quite line up with your $50. I suppose if you mean $50 in raw materials, plus construction costs, then fine, but that doesn't get you to 20x markup. The margin isn't that crazy. Typical retail markup is 30%.
Lol, that's now how business works. No one likes paying taxes, you hire all of your friends and connections to be the executives and pay them millions to tens of millions of dollars a year so your network and reputation grow despite the fact that anyone else is also capable of having calls with other businessmen and sending emails out (and it's all basically a tax write off because it's no longer profit for your company, as these 'friends in college' executives join you for dinner at a 3 michelin star restaurant with a CEO at another company, and your friend tells the CEO with their $10M/yr credential how unbelievable you are at business and investment), and then you hire an accountant to destroy the rest of the income for you through any amount of loop holes. IE: Just make 10 companies and have your company contract that company for "consulting" and split up your profits among all of them and have the company stash the money away in its coffers causing the value of the company to grow, and then what would be 30-40% income tax turns into the much lower capital gains tax for owning your companies that "grew in value", and you can knock that down even further by claiming the companies aren't "worth very much" by selling stock for dirt cheap to your friend. Beyond even that, let's do better, be nice to the IRS and pay the taxes for your brand new 10 LLCs for the next 5 years in advance so that you can relieve them of the paperwork, and then find out a day later "wow these companies are so profitable" as the funds from your real company fly in because your LLCs are so good at "consulting" and "strategic analysis" - whoops! I already paid my taxes in advance hahaha
There's a reason wealthy politicians don't release their tax return... Neither Trump nor Bloomberg.
Just remember, profit is never what it seems, it's always far lower than what you think it is. The only time you spike it up is when you're ready to sell.
By what you linked from Casper: "we are not required to submit certain executive compensation matters to stockholder advisory votes", "we are not required to comply with certain disclosure requirements related to executive compensation, such as the requirement to disclose the correlation between executive compensation and performance and the requirement to present a comparison of our Chief Executive Officer's compensation to our median employee compensation.", but, but why wouldn't you tell them anyway, what are you hiding?
Especially when you manufacture in a poor country that's manufacturing a "high quality" product that justifies its high price by its "unique product" meanwhile you own the company the other country and it's impossible for the US to ever know that, not even as if they're even capable of taxing that foreign income that you use to take luxurious vacations in Macao with as you do business in Hong Kong, spending all of it tax free because you didn't make it in the US, even bringing a few rolex's home for cheaper that the market price is in the US to move the money over - you make money to bring your money from Vietnam to the US!
I might suspect your source is financially wealthy, and morally bankrupt - if I could follow 1/2 of what you said. But I was definitely entertained. Upvote.
Your average poor person will get in a fist fight over $100, and potentially shoot someone over $1000. They shoot people for nothing anyway. Give your average middle-class citizen $10M to cheat on their wife, and they will. Sometimes they pay $100 to do it anyway. Maybe you won't, but I'll show you how it scales up. And, I'm not saying that in any way these businessmen are immoral, I'll touch on morality at the end, but about avoiding taxes, I can convey to you how it works. Coming as someone who was very, very, pro-Bernie. (Who, by the way, Bernie did not opt to tax himself according to his own laws. I was upset, I told myself that's exactly what I would do, but I understand now). It's, it's just because the orders of magnitude are too large, when all you deal with in a daily basis is $10-$20 purchases, you can easily stand on the moral high ground, it seems absurd to exchange morality for your $10 chicken parm, it just doesn't matter. But say, for $200, it seems difficult to swallow going up to the cashier and saying the kiosk made a mistake, I mean you can just keep it right - it's their fault, right? Well, the voters don't seem to be arguing to increase the capital gains tax, isn't that their fault? You might just pocket the $200.
For $1000 in a wallet, will you search for who dropped it if there's no ID but you know it wasn't there a minute ago? A few seconds pass and they're lost in the times square crowd. If you had shouted "wallet!", everyone would have touched their pocket, and a man would have said "fuck!" and then ran over to you. But you paused. Now he's gone. Why? Why did you pause? You find the wallet again tomorrow, you look around as you put $1000 in your pocket. It seems, it seems this is normal you say. He keeps leaving this wallet. You tour Macao with your gf before coming home, and finding that wallet one more time in times square. Do you take it? You're loved now more than ever by your family, and your unbelievable vacation experience. You take it, you slowly walk away.
It's too easy.
The accountant gives you your tax return, and you saved $1000. You end up being bored and scroll through it, and you see something that's pretty dubious, it's legal I guess you say to yourself but you know it's moving the money around in a weird way. You talk to the account, but he already submitted it to the IRS. What do you do now? I mean, I guess maybe I'll think about it next time. Next time comes, you know what'll happen, but you never open the pdf. That's the wallet. The wallet with $1000 in it. You only cost each American, what, pennies? micro-pennies? nano-pennies? There's not even anyone to return it to, no one who will thank you. The IRS will say "Uh, okay I guess", as the federal budget squanders the money away anyway.
The next year, it's $10000. What do you do now? You've been doing it for years. The IRS already audited and said you're good to go. Do you do something? There's always the gateway drug, each step is easier than the last.
I agree, it's horrible, it's evil, you can feel it. But, but do you, personally, say no?
The middle class is no better, money makes you evil once you get it, you have no choice. Power makes you evil, even the priests can't stop molesting. There's no choice, when you're 7 orders of magnitude away from what things actually cost in day-to-day life it becomes much harder to swallow paying $100M more in taxes than you could be paying, especially when you can get the IRS to audit you and they begrudgingly agree that it's completely legal, by the same laws that the people can protest for and control if they care enough about it.
The other valid option is to make middle class life so enjoyable that you don't have the motivation to accumulate wealth, working 9-5 commuting and eating dinner means you have only 2 hours left to actually do something, that life sucks, it's horrible. Weekends are just enough time to recover for the next Monday, that's why ads on YouTube business videos will show someone throwing money around saying "Are you ready to quit your 9-5?", it's a dream. Europe mastered the art of making middle class life good enough to quell the desire for business, so much PTO, so many vacations and weeks off, so many people working "80%" or "60%" schedules where they take days off or work fewer hours, college free no debt, Singapore gave everyone a house now no one has to pay rent. But did the 512 million people in the EU invent the smartphone? We'd be stuck in the 1960s if America didn't exist, Europe didn't invent anything or innovate in any way. No one wanted to. So in a way, the system works, it keeps innovation running, when communism created something horrible for the people and socialism keeps them stuck in time forever. The deep desire to live the businessman's life is why the economy continues to improve by 2% year over year as Trains and Model T's turn into 747's and SpaceX, there's an extreme need for that life that socialism quells and communism obliterates.
It sounds so stupid to you too, why do they protest for PTO? I'll just take that money out of their salary. They're too stupid to save the money themselves? I had to save so much money to get here, from the same 9-5 that they are in. The sympathy disappears. If you were forced to take vacations that you didn't even want, you know you could've never became rich. The fucking hour break I had to take lunch off for in California was abuse for 4 months, I NEEDED that hour! I NEEDED it to grow the businesses, the startups, the credentials to network with! I ask - Can I have lunch at 4pm, ie just leave early? No. It's illegal. It's fucking agony to be shoved around by the bureaucracy, each law making harder for you to accumulate wealth, to buy freedom. I NEED that hour. I can't even use the fucking computers because they "think that's work" when you have the terminal open and they're terrified of the government and bad PR. You NEEDED that hour. These socialists just want to squander away what they need to actually live the life they want to live. The sympathy runs to zero, businessmen grow up as kids loving Sanders and people like Yang, it disappears as they become Republicans later in life, holding abortion in front of them like a carrot on a stick as a way to sway an easily manipulable audience.
But, you never feel bad. In Tech, they never keep it (The old money and traditional businessmen are the scumbags, fucking Waltons). After you retire, you're done working, you turn back into your old self, the way you were when you were 12 years old begging for people to vote for redistributing the wealth, begging to tax the rich, begging to close the loopholes. You calm down. The passion slows. You donate your money, you build universities, you create foundations and charities. Gates was ruthless for most of his life, but what does he do now? You obviously can't spend it. What the fuck do you even buy. There's nothing that costs that much! You just give it away, your friends, your family, most of it back to the people.
And, when you think about it, what do you have now? Paper? Paper means nothing. You created millions of dollars in value for all these people - the money is right there, you can see the value you generated. And you never actually made them work. They never had to work for it, at all. You gave them value, they gave you paper. You innovate the economy, you move it forward, you created jobs, and the people never had to pay for it. The people have a fake dream that redistributing paper will make them work less. No, who's going to spend the paper more? The businessmen who was addicted to accumulating it, or the middle class themselves. Overall, they just make themselves work more when you move the paper around. You can end your life burning the billions away. Well, it's on a computer, so that's more boring. But still, if it disappears into a black hole, the middle class never actually had to work for me. I worked for them. The economy runs because businessmen play the clicker game of their life, addicted to the number rising like its cocaine.
Just, imagine you were in a simple tribe. You used sea shells to trade. You make a hat, give him a seashell, and he gives it back to you only if you make him a table. But, this one guy seems obsessive, he'll collect all of them. He gives you technology in return. The man, never actually seem to do anything in response? You 'print' seashells, give it to him, and he tells people what exactly they have to do to optimize building houses, farming food, building computers hardware software, he positions the pawns to run optimally and most efficiently. The government fucks up and wastes $80M building a fucking elevator shaft. And, you, the tribe member, wait for the businessman to use the seashells in return, just like how everyone else makes a table for seashells, and you make food when people give you the seashells. You expect to have to work for him, you know you could end up working for life if he gave you enough seashells. But that never happens. The man just, keeps them. He loves them. He looks at how shiny they are. But mostly just keeps to himself. And then at the end, he uses the seashells to tell people how to build extravagant libraries, universities, charities, foundations, helping the needy. And, that's it, that's all that ever happens. You, make food for your fellow middle class'ers. You eat your food for 1/100th the cost it would take to pay a 1700s farmer, because the man told the farmer how to farm really well. But, you never actually need to give the mysterious man anything. He never spends his seashells.
The intellectuals are interesting, they invent circuits, they invent the internet. But nothing happens. A decade passes, and nothing. No one uses it. A few universities use it, a few nerds, but that's it. The USSR obviously does fuck nothing with it even though their nerds did the same thing. No, you brought it to the people. Now everyone has it. They have high bandwidth, low latency, billions of people have it, they have every type of website they could ask for. Before it was just a few nerds in a university, stuck for a decade doing nothing to get it into the masses. They'd be suck forever if Europe was the only country. Making flat-screen monitors was grueling research, it took millions of hours, none of it was fun like how playing with circuits was fun for Turing or Von Neumann, and it took another 50 years to get the research into public hands through the funding by for-profit AT&T into Bell Labs. Europe? They did nothing. No one would have ever invented the flat screen monitor if it wasn't for you - I'm talking to you - feel it -, no one would ever have put so much effort to improve the smartphone's screen so that it's at the quality that it is today. That research was not fun, no one in universities ever helped. If the world was Europe and the USSR, after a thousand years, no one would have ever invented and innovated these items. China might have came around, they're just copycats but that's our fault we were here first, China could've invented it themselves. But maybe, if they didn't see us, they never would've pivoted to capitalism. America's legal system is why we're in the modern world, no one else did it, and no one else was even making progress.
You end up, not really feeling bad about it. You did what you had to do. You give each kid connections, networks, not money. You know money is worth nothing in business, only credentials. So you have no reason to pass the money down. You just give it away to the people. You give it away, you don't spend it, don't give it to your kids, give it to the people! The morals feel great. (The people who setup trust funds for their children and descendants are bastards, the kids generate no value, they make the people work for them like slaves as the kids give the people useless seashells in return, and you miss out on the value that they could have generated if they were also businessmen, though that ends up reducing the average IQ of businessmen overtime which fucks everything up, there's a balancing act there)
That’s quite the fantasy you’ve costructed for yourself.
In it Europe hasn’t invented anything.
Quality of life is just a sham invented by politicians to keep the plebs from demanding... quality of life?
And since you mentioned a 747 as an example of Americas greatness. Well the 747 is but we have been witnessing the real life consequnces of the ‘greed-is-good’ approach to business on a once-great engineering company.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Quality of life is just a sham invented by politicians to keep the plebs from demanding... quality of life?". I don't think politicians invented anything like that? I remain confused.
I mean, I can be more lenient. Europe had good researchers. They were the Athens, between the Germans ones of the 20-50's, and Turing, there was a lot. The Russians got a lot done too. But again, all research. Nothing profitable. It was never self propagating. Rome was self propagating, they conquered. Athens, only sustained intellectualism until it bled away.
(I'm not counting the mathematicians of the 1700s that did amazing work, I'm referring to modern Europe and the US, 20th century and beyond)
It's kind of sad that a huge market for businessmen is taking an American business, and just doing the same thing in Europe or Latin America. It's, it's sad. There's uh, absolutely no foreign competition in most situations that we have to meet. The ratio is clearly wrong, and we compete with more companies than we can found so Europe should statistically be represented in the other direction. It's not even that profitable, American consumers are a gold mine they're so price insensitive. And the modern world is mostly what was invented in the roaring 20s in the US, and computing technology that was developed almost entirely in the US.
(The Japanese were trailing along in the 80s I guess, but they were mostly our China, they were just a factory line that we abandoned when China caught up and their GDP has stagnated for 20 years. They had a few great companies, and they still do. South Korea is the only actual one that goes toe-to-toe but they're too small to profit off 300 million people like we can, per capita I do think they are more entrepreneurial and inventive than us though)
There's not even VC money in Europe it's almost impossible to get funded, you need American or Chinese money which means they own most of the business anyway. Like in the US, take the money away, you can get started again. But in Europe? You better buy a plane ticket. No one will fund you. The non-tech companies are mostly incumbents. Or brands like WeWork that are much more expensive than other co-working spaces but they have the brand to hold them up.
This is kind of what I touch on at the end, with the getting the kids into business, there is a moral concern there. The first executives are intelligent, and caring. They're the engineers. Once you have MBAs flooding in, which HR doesn't know how else to hire people, it just becomes horrible. Feynmann famously ripped NASA a new one after asking the engineers "What's the probability of the Shuttle exploding?". They say: 1/100, 2/100. He asked the executives at NASA, they say 1/100000, 1/1000000. How, how is that even possible? You need the executives to be the engineer, or they fuck everything up. An engineer warned them about the o-ring, the executives ignored it because they were stupid. Same with the max:
Notably: "For the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane," Ed Pierson wrote to a company executive before the first tragedy.
This would never happen if the executives were engineers. Every time we, humanity, eventually gets stuck in a rut. The Romans invent the most unbelievably complex and well structured government of their time, while the gauls hunt like animals, and they conquer the world, they develop all of the technology (Well, the greeks were even better with their near idealistic Athens, but like the PhDs it never gets implemented or spreads). So the Romans do this, they win. Then...., nothing happens. It goes to shit. The Patricians murder the Plebians who protest, they become corrupt, the people have less and less control, it becomes awful. Then, dictatorship. Then, emperor. Who were the people who drafted the first setup of the roman government? They're 600 years dead, and those who replaced them made it shit. Took 1000 years to recover. The founding fathers. Compare George Washington, and his morality, to our modern politicians. No one had any reason to do anything other than create the perfect government, everyone helped, it was collaborative. Now they're cutthroat. It always goes to shit. Corporations are the new target. The founding fathers tried so hard to put every single failsafe they could, because they knew. They knew they knew. They knew those who would come after them would make it shit. While the founding fathers intentionally put failsafes - the entire article is a big ass fail safe you just read it (It just says exactly what the restrictions are - if people acted just like the founded fathers did they would never need restrictions in the first place), our modern politicians research every possible exploit to the system as if they're in infosec. Gerrymandering, oops! Jefferson forgot about that one, it took 300 years to discover the buffer overflow, but if it's discovered it's abused. Every metric becomes a target. The target of "leading the revolution" gave people who were intelligent and passionate about saving their country. The target of "becoming a politician" in 2020 is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Stone I highly suggest you read just the paragraph about high school. It shows what you need to be, what the selection criterion is. The only selection criterion that works is: Coming up with something new, a new business, a new idea, a new government. After that, they hunt. They get their MBAs to overthrow you with credentials so that they can squeeze themselves in, even though they didn't found Boeing. The patricians bribe who they had to to squeeze even, even though they never came up with the original government. The politicians cheat what they must to squeeze into what the founding fathers tried to prevent. Someone has their eyes on the prize.
Mind you, the French are just as intelligent as the Italians, they're nearly identical at birth, only culture separates them. A french man who grew up in italy is an italian man. It's the system that is what separated the gauls from the romans, and it's survival of the fittest, you're the first to have an opposable thumb then you win. Whoever figures out how to create a self propagating government wins, a couple people did, got a few thousand followers, and it propagated. Business is the new self propagating system, until stability is reached. Only the new people have what it takes. It's not really too genetic either, it is in some way have 4 kids one of them will work, what of the other three? Kahn couldn't stop it, Alexander the great couldn't stop it, Romans worked for 300 years because of adoption, but it was still bleeding. Go through the history. Each half century involved more failures by the plebians and more success from the corrupt patricians, it was slow but sped up, more and more restrictions were put on the people by the incumbents. You always need fresh people. Carnegie? Vanderbilt? Compare to the modern CEO of BP...., of Boeing, stability kills. In hackernews, for people in IT, no one knows shitty bosses and executives more than they do.
Every industry thinks they are the ones who run the world. Plumbers are reasonably sure the world turns to shit without them, but I'm not sure you use a toilet.
This rant is more sad than entertaining, though I was on-board at the start of the comment. Plug back into reality, even just a little bit.
Eh, I don't think so. There's too much interdependence, you can have anxiety over how many things your dependent on, especially in Tech. It's actually terrifying. If Azure closed down tomorrow I'd be fucked so hard, though any business will eventually try to be as independent as they can when they're big enough (Other than Netflix and AWS, I'm sure there's some under the table money making that happen as 50% margins apparently disappear from Netflix's wallet even though Netflix could just run it themselves). Too many companies and systems supply the whole world at a near monopoly, if epackets disappeared everyone would be fucked beyond belief. We all know that there's a lot of people involved, and we all do respect the workers too. Go to any area with businessmen, Grand Central Station or an international airport or something. And look at the section with books that are clearly targeted towards businessmen. At least 1/3rd of the selection is emotional support in response to having to fire people, and the emotional support of handling an economic downturn. People jumped out of buildings because of 1987 all over Downtown Manhattan, it was horrible. They know so many things need to be carefully in balance for them to continue.
You always have to be humble unless you're a billionaire because there's always someone vastly more powerful and rich than you are, by orders of magnitude. Your network's wealth and power as a normal distribution always ends up trailing behind you as you try to meet new people above you, but there's always the right tail end where you know a few people who could spend your net worth in a night because they want to.
Look at how humble the CEO of the Maverick's has to be as he meets Mark Cuban. It's somewhere in there, I'm not gonna find the time but it's in there.
I don't know if you've ever seen the Black Mirror dystopia about social media and kissing up to people. There's a lot of that. It sucks. That's why most business events involve drinking until tispy, it loosens everything up.
You’re making me hate my CPA. When I became wealthy, they barely reduced my taxes at all but they were very good at pressuring me into setting up convoluted schemes that turned out to be mostly useless and are a nightmare to unravel.
Is the mattress industry significantly different from furniture in general? In terms of rarity of purchase, huge markups, cheap raw materials, different brands at every store, and so on?
Back when I listened to the radio, there were literally mattress store ads multiple times an hour, all day every day. Sleep Train, etc. Is that the key to their "fantastic marketing?"
Yes. Furniture is the worst. You have to buy something high end to get any sort of quality, especially couches. This will sound crazy but I have a very expensive couch that was made in the 1970s and it is perfect. I also have a 1k sectional couch from Ashley's and it is absolutely terrible. Now I could probably fix the sectional with some diy hacks to firm it up but I don't have the skill. But that super expensive heirloom just keeps going.
Somewhat related, I read the book "Factory Man" [1] probably five years ago now. It's a story of a guy who came from a big furniture producing family that had several factory towns in Virginia I believe.
Anyway, talks about how they got started out in the late 1800s and how starting in the 1980s things started getting cheaper and cheaper and then started getting moved to China for manufacture.
Then it gets into how this guy worked to actually keep the company he inherited up and running in the US.
Was pre-2016, but the book definitely had undertones of all the big "culture" stories that went around that election.
The low end market keeps growing because it's all people can afford. Because salaries are not keeping up with productivity, and outside of white collar jobs, are struggling to keep up with inflation.
They assume it's high end because, to them, it is.
You can’t get people to spend enough on furniture that’ll last a century if they know it’ll be replaced once it’s out of fashion. People generally don’t keep a couch forever, even if it isn’t broken.
We go to a smallish local furniture store. Nothing there is really cheap (almost everything is over $1000) and you most likely have to order something (they only have display models). But every piece we've purchased from there has held up perfectly.
I'm sitting on a Flexsteel couch right now that is ten years old and takes a regular beating from four young kids, as well as a lot of use by adults. It's still as good as new.
I feel like kids are (probably) hard on fabrics and textile coverings, teenagers are hard on everything, and adults are hard on foam supports (if only because weight and body size). Just some assumptions!
Yeah, that seems about right. My kids like to jump on every part of the couch (arms and back as well as the cushions), but their weight (or lack thereof) prevents them from being able to do too much damage. We don't have teens yet, but I suspect that they'll continue to abuse the furniture (sitting on the arms, for instance) while also being heavy enough to do damage.
Exactly. If you want to save money on a foam mattress you can literally just buy one or two pieces of industrial foam and cut them to fit your bed. There's no special material, no magic formula.
You'd have to bulk order from China most likely or build your own mattress... or just order something cheap on Amazon where it is a race to the bottom. IKEA is also ok. I prefer Costco b/c of the return policy itself. Maybe you might find a hotel liquidator.
The fact that we all sleep in hotels though shows you that the mattress resale laws are kind of weird or antiquated .. e.g. maybe last century. It seems like there should be a rehab process that allows a mattress to be resold "used" but clean. I am guessing the reason is health and safety but given craigslist where mattress change hands ad infinitum I am not sure how big the risk is. The fire risk is obviously a bigger deal.
Mattresses could be frozen for 72 hours and kept in a very hot environment for a while too, that’s kill both fungus and bedbugs. If laws allowed it there would be such a business. I wonder if the mattress business lobbies to keep these laws in place. Or whether they’re at the source of some bedbugs infestations. I wouldnt be surprised, in the mattress business it’s a cut throat in all directions type of world
That's enough for many of us to avoid it, it hardly needs regulation. GP's point is that we gladly share hotel mattresses. Bed bugs are consequently occasionally an inconvenience.
The hotels check for bedbugs often and are aggressive in their cleaning habits. They know their reputation is shot once they have even one infestation. Now buy a used mattress from a source you don’t know whose hygiene is also unknown, you just don’t take that risk.
Sure, that can kill a few of them, but entirely inadequate for actually getting rid of any real infestation. They breed much more quickly than the diatomaceous earth can kill, and can survive on the order of months without any feeding so you can never be sure to have killed them all with a passive approach that just waits for them to come out and kill themselves.
Have you ever worked with diatomaceous earth? I have.
1. It's fine and goes everywhere. Breathing it is especially ill-advised.
2. The first light breeze, mammal to walk by or light misting of rain will wipe it away.
Giving yourself silicosis in the process of not actually killing them.
One of my former roommates got bed bugs that were living in the wall from either the neighbor or a previous tenant. Only insecticides are going to solve that problem, not some holistic, "negative ions" (radioactive thorium) panacea snake oil.
They're tiny. Even the adults are quite small. The babies are specks. The younger ones are clear unless they've recently fed, so nearly invisible when they aren't bright red from ingesting blood.
They have a real talent for going unnoticed, even when there are dozens or hundreds of them. People often discover an infestation due to bites or poop smears, not from seeing a live bug at any time.
They mostly come out at night and I think they can hibernate for long periods, like weeks or months. They are quite hard to get rid of once they get into something like a mattress.
I can confirm all of the above, having lived through an infestation myself. Had to ditch my dirt cheap apartment and basically throw away all of my belongings at the time out of fear of bringing any of them with me to the next place ("luckily" I didn't have much at the time as I was a poor student). And then ended up spending $2000+ anyways on a full room heat treatment for my new place because I could swear I was still getting new bite marks and it was driving me insane (though in hindsight they might have been what's referred to as "phantom bites" but I wasn't going to take the chance to find out after going through that whole ordeal).
Up to that point I've lived in shady places with ants, roaches and rats and other shitty stuff but none of that bothered me too much, so I thought I could handle any shitty living arrangement as long as the price was right, but the bed bugs thing was by far the most nerve wracking experience of my entire life, and even made me contemplate suicide at one point. I learned to not cheap out on a place to live ever since... And definitely never pick up used furniture lying on the sidewalk, which I used to do a lot...
So yeah... I can see why people might have reservations against used mattresses...
> People often discover an infestation due to bites
Oh man that brings back some memories, I used to have bites all over my hands and I just assumed its because of mosquitoes although I had not seen or heard a mosquito in the room. 2 weeks after first bite was discovered I saw a bed bug running away slowly because it was full with my blood. I followed it under the bed where I saw a huge colony of bed bugs, I was literally speechless, just could not believe, there were so many of them all living on my blood.
Even Phoenix rarely hits 50C and you'd have to be crazy, or have a broken AC system, to let the inside of your house get that hot. So that leaves, what? Desert countries where AC isn't widely used?
The reports I'm relying on comes from Alice Springs, Australia, which is pretty much smack bang in the middle of a country that is mostly desert. So yeah, desert country describes it pretty well. Ambient temp there was over 47 for days at a time this year.
And yes, "no aircon" also applies. Aircon is a recent thing and most (almost all?) houses outside of the Alice metro don't have it. Hotels that leave the aircon on can still have bed bugs:
But notice this quote: "As I left they gave me a black plastic bag and advised me to keep my clothes in the bag and leave it in the sun for a few days to kill the bugs.
The bags were kept on the counter so it seemed standard procedure to provide departing guests with them."
In reality most houses north of 30 degrees and west of the great dividing in Australia will kill the bugs if you lock them up in the summer letting the temp inside get 10C degrees above ambient. As it happens Australia statuary minimum requirement for workers annual holidays is 4 weeks, and it's traditional to take it over Xmas - which is our summer.
In reality most of the country lives east of the great divide, however even where I live on the coast at 27 degrees south it hits 40C ambient for few days. It doubt it would be hard to nudge it another 10, and a bed bug biting me on the arse would be more than enough incentive for me to find out.
And no, I would not be in staying in the house at the time. As you say, that would be crazy.
There are many places that refurb mattresses. My dad used to run housing projects, and people would dumpster dive to sell mattresses when they cleaned out apartments.
IKEA for example sells a lot of mattresses under 150$. Under that you can just by foam pads, but the biggest savings is simply avoiding mattress stores or companies.
If you like pillow tops or those egg shell foam pads you can also just buy them separately.
One interesting diy hack I read about is to put insulation or sound proofing around your dishwasher. Basically $20 in insulation can turn an old dishwasher or a $200 dishwasher into something super quiet.
I've slept on a 150 dollar Ikea for years and I've slept on a leesa. Maybe these conspiracy theories are true, but the Leesa is much more comfortable than the cheap Ikea. Ikea also has more expensive substantial mattress options, but it looks like they approach the same price range anyway. So what's your real suggestion then? Sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag?
Personal preference does not make any option objectively better. So, my suggestion is to explore your options. I enjoy a 4” foam pad on plywood over several thousand dollar mattresses, but it’s not a question of cost just comfort. Water beds are another cheap option that have largely fallen out of favor.
PS: Body weight is a huge part of this. Gain or lose significant weight and your preference is likely to change.
Check out https://www.themattressunderground.com/. It is a site for people who nerd out on mattress construction going so far as to assemble their own from layers, but their forum has a user curated list of small local manufacturers for almost every metropolitan area. The smaller manufacturers are not necessarily cheap, but the good ones do a better job of using higher quality materials and understanding your specific needs.
Walmart has a decent quality memory foam mattresses for under $200 (Spa Sensations). I've used them for many years and don't see a reason to spend more.
I've bought my last couple mattresses on Walmart.com. Good price, free shipping, and foam felt like any other foam I've laid on. And because the price is good, I don't mind replacing them more frequently.
Maybe off topic, but isn't that true for a lot of so-called tech start-ups in general? E.g. companies like Voi or bird? At least from the outside it looks a lot like the company with the biggest marketing budget and best marketing team wins. So basically the company that raises the most VC money wins. So a different kind of marketing.
One example I know that played out exactlly like that, Flixbus. The operations part comes from a company, meinfernbus.de, which was acquired by Flixbus (officially they merged) after Flixbus won the marketing battle over customers and had more VC money. The same happened in other countries, e.g. Austria. And Flixbus was totally aware of that and had a marketing strategy to match. Like buying AdWords against their competition and such things.
Don't plan to sleep on it right after you take it out of the box. Give it a few days in a well ventilated room - open the window at least a bit. If you can keep it on the balcony, it will work even better.
We've made custom cushions from foam we got from https://www.thefoamfactory.com/ (no affiliation). They apparently do have "mattresses", but also just stock a bunch of foam that they can ship to you and you can cut to dimension.
We made basically a futon mattress out of wool several years ago. Has been holding up great. If you're not afraid to get creative, there's not really all that much to a bed. Especially if you get away from the coil spring kind.
There are plenty of foam suppliers in the US and probably every country, most of them will sell you rolls of whatever you want and plenty will let you come do it in the factory.
I'm not OP, but I'd guess its because there is a really limited market for mattresses. People of course need and want them, but the turnover is (or can be) a very long time. I have a mattress in our guest bedroom that I used in college, over 20 years ago. It could probably be replaced, but will probably only get replaced with our main mattress when we replace it. It's fine for the minimal guests we have or when my wife or I sleep in it when we are sick (and don't want to keep the other awake).
So for mattresses you really can't afford low margins if you want to stay in business. I can't imagine mattress stores sell more than several mattresses a month. As for why Casper and Purple mattresses are so much when you are supposedly removing the middle-man (the physical stores), I'm not sure. Because they can? I don't really understand why someone would buy one of their mattresses that you can't test out at a store, when you can pay the same price at a store and test out all your options.
Said another way, none of us need to buy mattresses often enough that we are mattress-buying-experts, so we're chumps easily taken advantage of.
This could apply to cars (and it does a bit) but the higher price and social factor makes people understand them more. Mattresses are just cheap enough (with just enough "bargains") that it's easier to just get it over with.
For your last point I'm from Australia so our brands are different but we have plenty of the online foam mattresses. I got one because mattress stores felt a lot like a car sales lot last time - clingy, pressure tactics from someone with a massive information advantage. The online companies all had full refund policies so there's limited risk apart from time.
> Said another way, none of us need to buy mattresses often enough that we are mattress-buying-experts, so we're chumps easily taken advantage of.
But there are people who do buy them often enough - hotels! I like to find a Marriott/Hilton/Hyatt/IHG standard mattress and it should be good enough. Ask a hotel manager to hook you up, should only be $250 to $500 at most for a King.
> I don't really understand why someone would buy one of their mattresses that you can't test out at a store
As someone who bought a mattress online:
1. You don't have to go to a store, which makes it much more convenient to buy.
2. If you don't like it, you can return it for a full refund, so there's no possibility of wasting money on a mattress you don't like.
Because its really hard to objectively rate a mattress. IKEA sells them at a fair price and they are great, but people in their minds see them as shit because they are cheap so they can't possibly be as good as the $2000 one.
If they were truly as good, word would spread (word-of-mouth) and the market would re-align. Blog posts would be written about how we're all naive for spending $2,000 instead of $150.
They are. I'm pretty sure the "$2000 mattresses are a scam" story pops up every few months here. I have even tried to tell people that my $300 mattress is great but people don't listen. The marketing is too strong and its a product they want to spend a lot on since it lasts ages and gets constant use.
The 2k$ mattress companies often pay kickbacks and/or outright buy the blogs on which those posts would be written. The 150$ mattress companies don't do that.
I would chalk it up to the fact that no one has tried (in the US). A startup could easily jump in on the cheap memory foam mattress game, but most mattress sellers are not startup folk. It's just so low effort to buy from serta, casper, etc. with absurd markups since that's the market rate. The "competition" looks a lot like the used car racket, but you don't need to join the car dealership cartel to sell mattresses. I'm guessing the big manufacturers have contracts that spec out minimum reseller prices with threats to stop supply. It's just ridiculous to think that all mattress sellers would risk easily being undercut running 2000+% markups.
As for a startup, generally people don't buy mattresses that often, but I know I would if they were 100$. Even cheap ones end up around 5-700$, which is nowhere near an impulse buy. As a result, I only replace a mattress if it's completely worn out, which takes a solid 10-15 years.
Funny how popular it is to replace the 800$ phone every 1-3 years but 1-3k$ has to wait until the mattress is unbearable. Everyone I know has this attitude for mattresses.
2) The average markup isn't 2000%. You can look at Casper's COGS in their S-1. Also, the return rate is built into the cost, so that adds to it.
3) In general, a cheap mattress is going to be perceived as low quality. It's like how nobody wanted Warby Parker glasses when they were priced around $20. Then they changed the price to $99+ and they actually improved sales.
Thought so too until I got into the industry. The establish players have run up marketing costs so that your average cost per acquisition can get out of hand quickly. It’s really hard to crack profitability with a cheap mattress.
I’d have to look at my data to see CPC costs but i tried a lot of angles and channels to generate sales cheaply and struggled to find anything sustainable.
CPCs, ad dollars, imagery, affiliate commissions hell, It’s only a matter of time before some affiliate comes in this thread pumping their garbage mattress review site. Half of them you can even get listed on without them asking for a special deal or rate.
Edit: Here's the german discounter store archive, it lists past sales of the three largest chains Lidl, Aldi north/south. Just search for "Matratze" and you can check past sales up to 15yrs ago:
Honestly it’s 90% perception and 10% marketing costs.
The market is super saturated CPCs, affiliate commissions and the rest of the advertising eats into the real margin.
The rest of it I always saw that people associated more expensive with better when in reality there isn’t that much difference in quality. ie they will all suffer from sagging at some point. Brands play into this too.
Could depend on where the markup is and whose margin.
If all those retailers are themselves buying from a small number of suppliers, they could be paying a lot of that markup, while their own margin is razor thin due to cutting each others' throats.
It's worth reading the article to get context before commenting.
What experience do you have to assert "These companies are all marketing companies. There is no “science” they literally get rolls of foam from foam makers, throw them on in layers and try to find the right combo. I was there, I’ve done it myself."
I purchased a Purple 3, thinking that if I loved it, I'd just stick with it. I did love it, but I couldn't justify spending $2k on a twin
I don't understand this -- you loved the mattress and you knew the price when you ordered, so what other outcome did you expect if you couldn't justify the price to yourself even if you loved it? It seems that you'd have been better off going with a more affordably priced mattress from the beginning like a Leesa or Casper?
Otherwise you're just guaranteeing yourself a lot of hassle to send back a mattress that you know you don't want to pay for. Plus, now you know there's a more comfortable mattress out there that's out of your price range. It's kind of like test driving an $80K Acura when all you can afford is a $30K Honda, sure you may love the Acura, but if you can't afford it anyway, why bother?
1. Testing cars you can't afford is awesome. Knowing the full range of experience in a good can be very enlightening. How much better is a $10,000 camera from a $1,000 camera, or $400 wine from $4? I used to run a tasting group which is basically a way to pool money and try liquors that are vastly out of our individual price range and I highly recommend it. You can try expensive cars and mattresses for free, that's even better!
2. What's wrong with thinking "Well it is great, but its not $2000 great." You aren't beholden to the thoughts you had about how worth-it it might be before you tried it.
>What's wrong with thinking "Well it is great, but its not $2000 great." You aren't beholden to the thoughts you had about how worth-it it might be before you tried it.
Nothing. But I read the GP comment more along the lines of "It was as great as I imagined it would be but it was still too much money"
Sure, if you can, if something expensive is good but not as great as you hoped it would be for the money, return it. But it's a bit hard for me to see buying (not test driving) something that, however great it is you're not keeping it.
I can see the value in test driving a car a class above your level so you can see what you're missing. When I was looking for a car, I tried out a low-end Acura in addition to a high-end Honda, but those are $35K and $45K cars.
I could probably justify the $10K jump in price if the Acura was spectacular, but no matter how much I love an $80K car, I could never justify buying one.
I doubt it would be any different. I have an SUV which I use for sport transportation stuff. I got rid of my old 2-seater. I like sports cars. But I'm not really willing to pay for them given that I'd drive them a few thousand miles a year--mostly in conditions where I wouldn't really enjoy them.
Yes, but the parent commenter explicitly said the plan was to keep it if they loved it, and they loved it, but they didn't keep it because it was too expensive.
Probably more along the lines of, "if I love it thiiiiiis much, then I'm willing to spend the $2k, but I only loved it thiiis much, so I couldn't justify the expenditure."
It was bought on credit, so I had no oop costs for the trial. I was having sleeping problems and wanted something that would unreservedly improve my rest. It did improve it, which, as anyone who's gone an extended period sleep-deprived will tell you, skews your feelings a bit. However, it didn't solve all of my problems, which meant I couldn't justify going into debt for it. Put another way: if I'm going to spend $2k on a mattress, the enhanced sleep quality should at least net me $1k+ in productivity gains. I wasn't seeing that, so it had to go back.
Worst-case scenario was that I didn't like any of the replacements and just purchased a new unit later, preferably at a discount. So it just made sense.
I hesitate to judge GP, but I had exactly the same internal monologue to their post. On the flip side, the high price of the Purple stuff is because they're pricing in dealing with people who have such uncertainty, so the customer-base are all playing each other, while we sit on the sidelines and just buy a cheaper one at the outset.
"It's kind of like test driving an $80K Acura"
It's much worse than that. When you drive that Acura back into the lot it's still a new car and the eventual buyer will love it just as much. When you return that mattress it's a used mattress that at best is going to be donated to a charity, but more likely is ending up going to a landfill.
Purple stuff is high-priced because they're one of two companies you can buy their signature feature from. It's the Wacom Principle. They could honestly sell it for far cheaper, or sell a gel grid mattress topper, and get far fewer returns, but I suppose the higher margin is more profitable.
> Was my mattress so cheaply-made that the manufacturer could afford to give them away?
Shipping is expensive, especially for something as heavy and bulky as an uncompressed foam mattress. Among other things, I have a free stroller (sans cup holder) and a life-time supply of Feather razor blades (they accidentally sent the bulk packaging) because Amazon didn't want to pay for return shipping.
Factor in the risks and headaches of trying to resell a used mattress, and I can easily see never wanting to take one back even if it means having to factor into the regular price the costs of finicky buyers. The mattress market is weird: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mattress-store-bubble/
There was a pretty popular recent post on reddit's /r/unethicallifeprotips about this recently.
It's beginning to become common knowledge that paying for a mail-order mattress is often optional. By choosing not to request a refund (and keep the product), you are subsidizing the purchases of everyone else who does.
If you squint this kind of looks like the CyberRebate business model and I wonder how much longer it'll be sustainable.
During the dot com bubble of 2000-2001, there was a company where you could buy things online for 10x the normal retail price, but they'd send you a rebate of the price after a couple of months. (And you would keep whatever you'd bought)
Much like every other time someone claimed to make all their profit off of the "float", it turned out to be a big scam
It's also impossible to comparison shop because most people buy them once a decade, you don't really break them in for weeks, and sleeping is so subjective it's impossible to take anyone's word for it.
I bought a queen for around $600. It's fine. Improving sleep has been more about exercising more often, decreasing screen time, and reading/meditating before bed.
I was doing some research because I'm going to have to buy one for a vacation house later this year. On the one hand, I don't want to just randomly choose an expensive purchase. On the other hand, truth be told, I spend a quarter to a third of nights in various hotel rooms and they're mostly "fine."
And I've personally had everything from a waterbed to a (high-end) futon in my own house.
So I know I don't want something really crappy but so long as I don't go off in some weird direction or really cheap out, I'm sure I'll be just fine.
Well according to some of the other comments you can shop around for a "free" mattress because it's not worth returning. Just make you destroy it by leaving it somewhere, maybe like a vacation home.
There is I think a little bit of an ethical grey area in buying, trying, and returning a thing in the hope that it’s not worth their effort to ship it back.
I can’t really say that taking a company up on a free trial counts as wardrobing.
Yeah, I bought an expensive umbrellas for my backyard. It came without a pin in the hinge so it wouldn't open/close properly.
I told them, they said to throw it away and they would send me a new one. They sent me a new one but I repaired the other one - it seemed line a terrible waste to toss it. It crossed my mind that I could claim similar things for other objects even when they weren't broken.
That said, they both broke within a year. Taught me another lesson: buy cheap, replace yearly. Better than buying expensive and replacing yearly. Now I buy $50 outdoor wooden umbrellas.
I'm no ecowarrior, but perhaps I am a contradiction-warrior
... You started out saying throwing one away seemed a terrible waste, and now you, by plan and forethought, do so annually?
Both of those broke in a way that couldn't be repaired in a year. So instead of buying a $600 umbrella that unfixably breaks every year, I buy a couple $50 ones. The $50 ones are actually more repairable since they're wood instead of metal.
Yeah I get it, and would probably do the same (I'd rather pay more for lasts, as I gather you would, but if that isn't working then sure cheap and replace).
It was just the discrepancy between the initial reluctance to throw away, (even though it had been replaced, implying to me ecological /'this is still fundamentally sound and repairable' reasoning) and the ultimate conclusion to throw away every year.
No judgement, just confusion.
On a tangent, I dislike more and more the unrepairability and complexity of things. I'd love to be capable of making everything for myself, from basic components (not necessarily scratch). Still not for eco reasons, it may be worse (less efficient) in some cases in that regard, but just to know how everything worked and was put together, and be able to fix it all because I built it in the first place.
I'm not sure I would count on that :-) I'm also not sure how I feel about the foam mattresses. That's one type of mattress I don't have a lot of experience sleeping on and my initial reaction in the store was it was "different" to a degree that I wasn't sure what to make of it.
Also, I tend to be hot generally including when sleeping. From what I've read, a foam mattress may not be a great choice given that.
If you sleep hot, memory foam is what you want to stay away from. You sink down into it and it molds around your body.
Non-memory latex foam lets you sleep much cooler because you don't sink into it so much. I also tend to be too warm and have used latex foam mattresses for the last 20 years. They have been fine, unlike memory foam.
I went with ikea for the vacation house. It is perfectly adequate (for us -- I know this is subjective) and realistically we only spend perhaps 50 nights a year there.
Part of the crazy markup in the mattress industry might be in the non-returnability of them. Manufacturers need to price in the fact that some % of them will be returned (read: given away for free) because no one wants a used mattress that might have bed bugs or other unknown substances.
I think it was covered either in the article or one of the comments here. But the companies don't really care because the mattress cost very little to make so they don't really make a loss if the customer was never going to buy it anyway.
The amount of effort and time required would just barely be covered by the profit. You also have to store it until sale. That's probably what keeps this from becoming a widespread scam.
I think you underestimate people's desire to scam the system. Buy $1000 mattress, leave in box, "return" mattress and get $1000 refund. Sell online (instead of donating) for $300-400. Rinse, repeat.
The "rinse" part is where it gets tricky. There are firms that track returns (at least for retail). I've seen people have their returns straight-up denied.
I mean, you're complaining about high margins on mattresses, yet you were able to return two mattresses. Hell, you didn't even return the $2000 mattress because you disliked it, you just decided "nvm lol".
Is it not obvious that part of the high margin that you scoff at goes towards covering your (and everyone else's) ability to return one of the most unwieldy household items on a whim?
Your post makes me wish I could take $500 off my purchase price by checking a "waive ability to refund" box on the checkout page instead of paying extra to subsidize this sort of consumer behavior. ;)
If you'd like to start a company along those lines, be my guest. Purple et al. are the ones who come up with and advertise their trials; you don't really have any basis to blame customers for using it as it was presented to them.
Perhaps these are a sort of the perverse capitalist incentives the hippies keep warning you about. ;)
> So I did some research. It turns out that the mattress industry is a racket. The markups are ludicrous; almost every mattress on the market costs, at most, a few hundred dollars to make.
Isn't this just a result of economies of scale?
Everything becomes cheap, so if you try to buy something expensive you don't necessarily get higher quality. Most likely you'll get ripped off, OR buy something artisanal which means lower consistency (maybe also quality).
That said: the psychology of it is probably that you sleep better in an expensive bed -- even if the only difference is the cost :)
Why are you buying a mattress for $2000 if you can’t justify spending $2000 on a mattress?
This kind of process is how you end up with the Sonos story where they remotely disable your electronics and you trash it, just so they know they aren’t giving it to you for free. The environment pays the price.
The same is true for brands like West Elm (and it's sister brands). If you find something you like on West Elm, and you have the time to dig long enough online, you can sometimes find the exact same product for a price much closer to the cost of materials.
Even more so on Wayfair, where you can find identical products on the same site that come from the same factory sold by different sellers for different prices, although the quality of Wayfair is more hit or miss than West Elm.
Get a firm or very firm innerspring mattress from IKEA. You can do this for less than $300 and it will fit in the back of a sedan in it's roll-up-package.
Sleep on it for a bit. If you don't like the feel, which you probably won't, add a memory foam mattress topper for ~$50. Use a thicker or thinner topper to suit your needs.
Congrats! Because your mattress is firm, its foam will not break down for a long, long time. Sleep easy knowing you didn't waste stupid amounts of money and that your mattress will last essentially forever.
Not sure this is good advice. I like a firm mattress, but IKEA mattresses are absolutely terrible. I also cannot sleep with a foam topper on any bed. They're hot and screw up my back beyond belief.
Ikea sells different types of mattress (spring, foam, latex), each with different thicknesses and price points.
I've bought ~10 Ikea mattresses, avoided the cheapest ones of each type, and been pretty happy.
I can understand why a foam topper would feel hot. It's main purpose is to provide a sleeping surface that's the same shape as your body, so of course this means it maximises the amount of contact between you and itself. So no space for air to circulate
But I don't understand how a foam topper can screw up your back, unless your mattress is too soft to begin with. A bad/cheap foam topper will compress pretty easily, and provide no additional support, but I don't see what harm it would do.
>I've bought ~10 Ikea mattresses, avoided the cheapest ones of each type, and been pretty happy.
You've bought ten mattresses from them?! In how many years, and for how many people?
I don't think my parents bought ten mattresses in the 20-odd years they had their four kids living at home - and I still sleep on one of them.
Personally I don't trust anything from Ikea anymore. Their quality is such garbage for all their products from furniture to glassware to lamps, I can't give them a dime of my money knowing whatever I buy won't be around next year. Multiply whatever you were going to spend by 1.5 and go to a decent home store, or just go to Target instead.
"You've bought ten mattresses from them?! In how many years, and for how many people?"
In ~20 years. Most are still in use. Some were for my parents, for guest rooms and for flats that ended up being rental properties. I bought two mattresses last year, as we moved to the US from China (which has different bed sizes).
"Their quality is such garbage for all their products from furniture to glassware to lamps"
This is an overstatement. I and my family members have several Pax wardrobes that are still going strong after 20 years. And several Malm dressers that have lasted over 10 years. As long you assemble and install the things correctly, and make sure they're straight, then there's no reason they shouldn't last.
There are Ikea dressers which are less sturdy than the Malm, because the drawer runners are weak ball-bearing style ones, instead of the wheely ones on the Malm. (Ball bearing runners can be great, but the ones I've seen on Ikea dressers aren't designed to carry much load.)
I’ve found a couple of patterns with IKEA. They’ll often have two virtually identical products, with overall quality and material being the only difference (particleboard vs. real wood, usually). Also, the main drawback is often the loose tolerances that lead to a given piece not always fitting together as well as it should.
> Personally I don't trust anything from Ikea anymore. Their quality is such garbage for all their products from furniture to glassware to lamps, I can't give them a dime of my money knowing whatever I buy won't be around next year. Multiply whatever you were going to spend by 1.5 and go to a decent home store, or just go to Target instead.
IKEA is such a hit and miss. For the price, their ceramicware is pretty good. All of their glassware is cheap and too small. They can have a really nice real-wood dining room table for $500, or a glued together entertainment unit for $2000.
I generally find they have good quality for wood dining chairs, wood tables, BEKANT desks, and rechargeable batteries.
I bought a foam mattress on Woot at one point. At first, I loved it. Best sleep I'd had in a long time.
After about a year or 2, I started to notice that I was not getting good sleep and my back was achy a lot.
I got a new bed with a more conventional mattress, and I was a lot happier with my sleep again.
The old mattress? I gave it to my mother. "Best sleep" situation for her again, but after a while she replaced it.
I think initially the comfort is amazing, but either it slowly erodes your back's health, or you slowly learn to sleep differently on it, and it hurts your back. At least, that's how it seemed for us.
The problem I have with foam mattresses is they conform to my shape TOO well. Pressure is transferred from my strong tough parts to my weak parts. Instead of applying pressure to my arms and back, foam will apply pressure to my ribs as well. It took months to get used to it.
I also got a firm IKEA foam mattress (MATRAND) a couple months ago and I was sleeping better from the first night, and a couple more nights and the knots in my shoulders were gone.
Also, at least in NYC it’s flat rate $50 for home delivery. I ordered on a Wednesday night and was delivered to me that Friday afternoon :) very happy with my cheap ikea mattress.
I’ve gotten those blue gel-impregnated foam toppers. I cannot abide a hot bed, and these have been fine.
I otherwise agree with OP. Firm inner spring with medium firm gel foam topper is both cheap and by far the best sleeping experience I’ve ever had. I used a cheap inner spring from wayfair.
FWIW I had a Leesa and ended up returning it. That went fine and dandy, everything worked as they promised with no frills.
What I actually want to share with you all here is to go to a mom-n-pop mattress store in your local area. Find your local mattress NERD and buy a bed from them. They're going to have all kinds of wild stuff you can try and will do a great job of selling you the right bed for you (and your partner).
My wife and I ended up finding this guy - https://www.youtube.com/user/MattressToGo - and watching some of his (surprisingly popular) videos you will see he is legitimately a mattress nerd.
Coincidentally we lived about an hour from his brick and mortar location so we drove out to check out the showroom and ended up buying a mattress on the spot. It took a few days to arrive but it's without a doubt my favorite mattress.
I love the convenience afforded by these modern startup companies but there is really something to be said for going to someone who has made one thing their entire life's misson and letting them help you out.
I have a Leesa and don't love it, but I've had it over a year now, so can't return it. I didn't realize "mom-n-pop mattress stores" existed -- how would one find one?
I ended up with an online-mattress purchase because of a poor experience with both a Mattress Firm store (pushy salespeople) and most obnoxiously with a specific manufacturer, Simmons. I stayed at an AirBnB in SF years ago and the bed was noticeably the most comfortable bed I've ever slept on. I messaged the host _years_ later and asked him what type of bed it was, and to my surprise and delight, he messaged me back with text and images of the tags on the mattress. When I tried contacting Simmons by phone, email, and even Facebook Message, telling them I would BUY that mattress, no matter the cost, if they could point me in the right direction, I got nowhere and was made to feel like I was a bother. So while it's easy for me to believe that these online mattress companies are marketing companies glueing foam together, maybe this is what we needed to make an outdated industry improve.
Hm. There’s another comment above along the lines of: “I worked with these stores, they are all selling random wildly overpriced garbage, don’t fall for it!”. I’m confused now.
I ordered a fridge and dishwasher from Costco. They were scuffed up during delivery.
Costco asked me to bear with them... send pictures... write up a report...
Once Costco was able to stick the delivery company for the bill, they sent me a new set. They didn't care about the original set.
At one point a guy showed up in a pickup. No uniform. Not in a delivery van, or truck. Just a guy with a dolly and a beat-up F150. He said, "I'm here for the old fridge."
When he saw they were new appliances, he was like, "Yeah, {the original delivery company} told me to take them to the dump... let me sell them, I'll come back with a U-Haul." And he kept texting and setting times and not showing. I had a Fridge and Dishwasher in my living room for over a month.
I asked Costco what was up... I asked them to get it take care of ASAP... they were like, "Uh... I mean, I guess we can... or you can just sell them..."
In the end I sold them to a neighbor, for half what I paid... he called the brand repair place and ordered a new door. Which is all I was expecting anyone to do in the first place.
I never liked the space a bed takes up so I decided to look into alternatives some years ago when it started to offer less support.
I always had a futon so I immediately switched to that. I also bought a cheap hammock and built some hammock stands to use it indoors.
I didn't have any problems adjusting to the futon; that's what I sleep on most of the time today. I'm also pretty sure I'd have no problems with a japanese style roll up beds either (it's basically like a futon anyway).
Hammocking, though, took a bit longer. I really wanted to make it work too. To make a long story short, my initial hammock was too short and now I do have a hammock I can sleep soundly in (which I do every now and then).
I was also initially interested on trying to train myself to sleep on a flat floor... but, ummm, that did not go well and I've never returned to trying. Maybe...
I slept on a hammock for years indoors slung between two huge hooks I screwed into my walls.
It took a couple weeks before I fully adjusted. One nice thing is that when I went camping or on a three month bike trip, I had my every-night bed with me! It felt so luxurious!
I loved it, and if I was single, I'd still be sleeping in a hammock every night.
I've watched videos about how to get in one and how to orient yourself in one it's not as simple as I thought. I'm not sure if I could sleep in a position that's anything but flat.
I have acid reflux so I stack up pillows but sometime I roll over flat on my stomach and barf (yeah nice right!). But in the morning my hands are asleep probably due to my neck at a bad angle.
I'd like to try a hammock but the attachments for the ends is the biggest problem.
> I was also initially interested on trying to train myself to sleep on a flat floor...
I've been sleeping on the floor for over two years now. At this point, I prefer it to sleeping in a bed. I started out by creating a "mattress" made of several layers of blankets. Now, though, I just put a sheet on my low-pile carpet and that's all I sleep on. I also use a relatively flat/thin pillow.
I went to a big-name department store just last week and bought a mattress. For the first time, I chose a "memory foam" mattress because I liked how it felt in the store. (Thought the traditional spring mattress felt more familiar and "right," there's something about the foam that was nice.)
When the giant delivery truck arrived three days later, there was the usual box spring, which I guess is what necessitated the truck, but then the delivery guys brought in a small box the size of a chair and that's what contained the shrunken mattress.
I asked what happens to the mattress if I decide that memory foam isn't for me after all, and they said it depends on the brand. Some go to charity, some go to an exporter for resale overseas, and some get shredded and made into new mattresses.
I asked about that. The only thing I would have to pay is the same delivery fee again for the truck to pick up the old mattress set (reasonable, IMO), and the price difference if I chose to replace it with a more expensive set.
It's risky for the charity. For instance, if the mattress has bedbugs, it stands a good chance of contaminating everything they've got in storage, requiring them to purge their entire inventory, sanitize, and build up from scratch again.
Off topic somewhat but there was a news story of a library that lost a ton of books because someone return a book infested with bed bug eggs. Went on the shelf and spread throughout the library.
Can't they set up an offsite hotbox to get rid of the bedbugs before it gets onsite? Surely someone could set up a mobile truck that can come, park, and heat up 15 mattresses for the few hours it takes to kill or drive off the bedbugs, no?
> Can't they set up an offsite hotbox to get rid of the bedbugs before it gets onsite?
I am not sure if you are serious or not, maybe you think charities have huge amounts of money to throw at all problems like Google does?
Bug covers for mattresses need to be of the right type and installed properly. Doing it upon pick up only increases the risk of damaging the cover and ruining any utility it has. They're not designed for durability and it takes only a pinhole puncture to ruin the entire cover.
I would assume the issue is partly that there aren't many organizations capable of dealing with it. You need to operate a warehouse for the mattresses, and have some sort of local storefront presence like Goodwill so people can donate and pick them up somewhere.
I recently needed to get rid of a mattress set, and looked online. There are dozens of pages claiming that $Charity_X won't take mattresses, and dozens more claiming it will.
That's the problem with the internet - it's sometimes not specific enough. Due to local laws, the charity in question doesn't take mattresses. Fortunately, in mine it does as long as there are no stains and they're in pretty good shape. It gets the mattresses fumigated and uses them in its homeless shelters and battered women's shelters.
Edit: I suspect the charities that won't take mattresses are ones that run primarily on resale revenue, and not those that run their own housing.
I bought a Purple mattress a few years ago. It was debilitatingly uncomfortable. After three nights I gave up and called them for a return. Their customer service spent quite a long time trying to convince me to keep trying: their pitch/theory was that their mattress is so extremely comfortable and all other mattresses are so extremely uncomfortable that the body gets used to that discomfort and it will take a few weeks or more to switch over to accepting the comfort of Purple. After repeatedly saying no thank you and eventually having to explain to them quite bluntly that their theory was complete horseshit, they processed the return... the "return" was a Salvation Army truck, which, when it arrived, already had two brand new Casper mattresses in it. I asked the guys in the truck if this was normal and they said "yeah, we get at least 1-2 of these every day".
FWIW, I bought an IKEA foam mattress + memory foam topper for about 1/3rd of what the Purple cost and it's been very comfortable for a few years now.
Surprisingly amazon.ca doesnt offer large item pickup like USA, and expected to return a king size expanded 10" thick foam mattress to the local post office.
I called them asking wtf, how am I supposed to return it.
They gave a me refund, and told me donate destroy it myself or even just keep it.
Online shopping is not that sustainable. Current concerns are returns. First you have the carbon emissions of the first package delivery then the return package carbon emissions plus the waste. The waste comes that is more expensive to handle return products than to simply throw them.
What I mean it’s more eco friendly to have big batch shipments to stores than individual small packages sent by post.
A normal physical store is usually more environmentally friendly than online shopping.
I like companies like Sharetown, they help prevent things from just ending up in a landfill and they make money doing it. There's a computer recycling company near me that does pretty well reselling equipment sent to them for recycling. They destroy drives when instructed to, but will wipe the rest and resell intact running servers and workstations.
It's nice working with them because I know the equipment will most likely find a home.
I bought one of these over a decade ago from Costco. It had a defect in it but I never really pursued returning it. I had no clue how I'd get it out of my house by myself. Use a chainsaw or machete to cut it into blocks and then toss it out the window and then take it to the dump? It was really heavy. Much heavier than normal mattresses. At least it seemed much more flexible to bend around corners.
I once had a loveseat that I couldn't get out of a studio apartment without moving almost everything. Since I was a bit bored at the time, I slowly carved up the entire thing with a Swiss Army knife w/ the saw & scissors extensions. Was actually kind of fun.
In Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1970s, a friend of mine inherited a flat and contents but no money. It was an extremely cold winter and he ended up chopping half the furniture to pieces (it was the typical hideous stuff you got in flats in Edinburgh back then) and burning it in the fire-place to keep warm.
At least in Europe most furniture uses fire retardant materials. But the chipboard that lots of things are made of will burn ok if you get it hot enough
I had a friend who moved into an old oddly shaped rental. When we went to move the heavy stuff in, the big front picture window was out for repair and the guys said we could move anything through it while they went to lunch. In the end, we spent an afternoon chopping couches and dressers and such into pieces and hauling it to the dump. Didn't really think that through.
I once tore up a recliner sofa with a crowbar and tossed the pieces out of a third story window (I didn't get it in, and there was no way it was going out the door in its then-present configuration).
Forgive me if this is off-topic. I am currently in the market for a queen size mattress in a box. The last one that I bought on Amazon was perfect, it cost about $300. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F8NNL8X It is no longer available. Now it seems that you can get a decent one for under $250. Here are some that I found:
It's my guest room mattress but I do sleep in the guest room occasionally, and when I do I sleep better than my normal mattress. That said, the edge support isn't great. Being close to the edge makes it feel almost like you're at a slight slope. Still, no regrets for $250.
Edit: I'm 6ft / 165 lb. It's possible that it would be less supportive for heavier weights.
I agree with the edge support and foam mattresses. A friend of mine asked me about whether he should recommend a foam mattress for his grandparents. I specifically said no because of the edge support. I fear someone with mobility issues might not be able to support themselves if they were to sit on the corner.
FWIW, my main mattress is also foam (Leesa) and seems to have good edge support. But the Leesa was a lot more expensive than the Amazon mattress, and I wanted to spend less since it was a guest room.
I bought an Avocado mattress in the strength of Consumer Reports' recommendation and, while it's certainly not the cheapest option, it is very comfortable.
I got the “Edow 10 inch firm foam mattress” and it’s perfect for me. It will probably last a long time too. It’s firm though so not everybody will like it. I would go to a mattress store and try out a firm foam mattress first
I've had several friends go out and buy it after a night on mine. I've had it for ~3 years and haven't noticed any degradation. After trying much more expensive (and heavily advertised) ones other people own, I can't really tell the difference.
I have the same mattress. Almost never give it a second thought, which is what I really want in a mattress. Some reviews complain of a fishy smell but I didn't encounter it with mine but there are enough reviews with that complain that I wonder if there are multiple manufacturing pipelines, one of which leads to a fishy smelling mattress.
I know this is about mail-order mattress companies. I have always thought that one of these Mattress store chains are going to be busted for being involved in a drug ring or something like that. There are way more locations than there needs to be. Especially with all of these online mattress brands popping up. There always seems to be 1 guy working and no one in the stores, ever. At any of these locations. I don't understand how a business model like that can last. But they're still kickin'
It feels like there might be other possibly uses of old or unwanted foam mattresses. Perhaps they can be cut down to standard sizes for home insulation batting? As insulation between raised garden bed containers and the ground? Insulation between the ground and a fish tank in an aquaponics setup?
While there might be better solutions for all of those things, if these materials are going to end up in the landfill and can be provided for almost no cost, it seems like a waste to not utilize the resource.
The Guardian recently had a long-ish article [1] on the state of mattress recycling and the economics of buying online. Its a fairly depressing read: these things are super-hard to recycle effectively and just get dumped like toxic waste:
"The mattresses these criminals can’t resell, they fly-tip – Circom has had mattresses dumped outside its warehouse – or dump in landfill. In some cases, fraudsters have been known to rent a shed from an unsuspecting landlord, fill it to the brim with mattresses – and scarper. “There are loads of fake companies out there filling up sheds,” agrees Ray Bagnall, of Matt UK, another mattress recycler. “Dumping them on farms in Sussex or Essex.” He was recently called to clear out a shed full of thousands of mattresses in Snowdonia."
It would be nice to think that a vendor making low environmental impact mattresses would effectively disrupt the market, but it just doesn't seem likely.
In some countries, you get the mattress inside an airtight/watertight packaging, and you only get a refund if you return it (yourself or for some shipping cost) while still in that packaging.
This means you can only get a feel for the softness/hardness but not breathability (due to the packaging). On the other hand, it means prices are sane.
Personally, I prefer this system to the US one, where the ethical purchasers subsidize the unethical purchasers and unethical, greedy sellers. YMMV.
Being thoughtful about the environment is important. It’s important to mention that some bed in a box realtors aren’t doing the best they can. Gotta Sleep uses bio foam which is made with soy based oils and donates all returned mattresses. https://gottasleep.com/products/omg-mattress
Some of the guarantees, at least when I looked a few years ago, include pickup for return. Presumably (cf article) not to original location; but still, hard to image something more zero risk than this.
With something like a 120 day no-questions asked, no risk return I think they are more relying on you getting used to it in that amount of time. And huge markup means they can eat quite a few too, I suppose.
"Cheap" spring mattress + foam pad + down/pillow-top layer is the best mattress purchase decision you can make. My queen set is under $300 and more comfortable than ~20 other fancy mattresses I tried, some as high as $2500. And it's "upgradable" and adjustable without needed to toss the whole thing.
Presumably the return policies will change once there are no more brick and mortar local mattress stores to buy from.
At that point, you'll only be able to buy online, and they won't need to offer returns. You have no choice but to have something delivered, or go without a mattress (my personal preference).
This will never happen because a decent chunk of people will never buy online. I like using computers as much as the rest of you but I would much rather just go in to a store and try a couple of them and pick one I like the first time rather than get random ones shipped to me and binning the ones I don't like.
what's your sleeping situation like w/o a mattress?
(I'm waiting for someone to invent & sell some sort of sleeping pod that provides a perfect environment, and keeps me in ideal position for the maximum sleep benefit)
Now I can finally feel like a smug eco-warrior by sleeping on the same queen mattress I used as a teenager.
In all seriousness though, these companies should make it easier to put their mattresses back in their box, especially if it means they could avoid something like this. I seem to recall my old air mattress could easily be deflated by running the pump in reverse, fitting in a tiny bag. Would it be too hard to have a re-compression pump that could be shipped back for a rebate with shipping included if you decide to keep the mattress? Re-compressing the mattresses would probably also make it easier to cram a bunch of them into some sort of extreme-temperature vault so any bedbugs or other pests could be exterminated before re-use.
It appears to take a fairly substantial press/vacuum sealer to squash these down, get them into their plastic bag so they don't explode, and roll them into a tight cylinder.
I bought a firm mattress from IKEA and it’s been great. These companies doing trials and returns sound like a scam to rope in people who like ‘free’ stuff.
At the returns department of the company I work for they use the returned mattresses to clean the floor. The put the forklift prongs inside the mattress and drive around to clean up the warehouse.
Mattress shopping is almost as bad as car shopping. I'll buy a used car to get around the sleazy car sales people, but the wife absolutely won't go for a used matresss.
I'm sure the mattress markup is astronomical, and I'm sure most brands come from the same factories.
I was happy with the two IKEA mattresses I bought. I have one super-cheap foam one that I used for many years and keep around for guests; guests say they like it more than their mattress at home, and I think it only cost $30 and has lasted going on 15 years at this point. I also had one of their more expensive latex foam mattresses, and that kind of developed a sunken in spot in the middle where I slept on it after ~5 years. I replaced it with a more botique latex mattress and the same thing happened; so I think that's more of an intrinsic weakness in the material rather than a manufacturing defect. And, you have to expect that something used every day for 8 continuous hours is going to need replacement after a few years anyway.
What I like about IKEA is that you just walk in and self-serve yourself a mattress. No sales. No marketing. If you don't like it, at least it was cheap. So I'm giving them a recommend.
I'll add a positive comment for IKEA mattresses here, too. We purchased one a couple of years ago. It was significantly cheaper than a "name brand" mattress, even if I consider that I may need to replace it more frequently. So far it has held up very well, too.
One caveat about IKEA mattresses: being a multi-national company, verify the mattresses and linens you're buying complies to the same sizing in your region of the world; they can differ and there's always stories about how IKEA sheets don't fit standard sizes or fit them well, at least.
I've bought mattresses from Ikea in the UK, China and USA.
In all three of those countries, Ikea sells mattresses in the regular local sizes. I recall that, maybe 20 years ago, Ikea in the UK only sold beds and mattresses in their native (Swedish? Euro?) sizes. But, in the last few years, I've bought both beds and mattresses from Ikea that are standard UK and standard US sizes.
Of course, it's always good to double check the actual measurements of your old/new mattress before pulling the trigger.
Sort of interesting to think about the fact that used mattresses are a no-go for people, but they'll gladly sleep on hotel beds used by orders of magnitude more people.
Don't think I'd buy a used mattress either though...
I think bedding is actually the thing that makes me most uneasy at hotels, you just don't have a choice. You can expect they wash the sheets with each new guest, but I don't think they do so with the comforter which grosses me out. Then there is the whole bed-bug situation...
ultimately people prefer not to stop and think about the fact that hotel beds are kinda gross, since there's really no alternative if you want to travel to a place where you don't know anyone.
but even if you do acknowledge this, it's not nearly as bad to sleep in a "dirty" bed for a few nights as it would be to own one and use it every night.
I once met someone who always traveled with something a bit like a thin cotton (silk?) full body sleeping bag (like a mummy bag). Idea was you never physically touched the hotel bed. It was apparently expensive.
The funny thing to me was the she stayed in high end hotels pretty exclusively who I think you can at least be taking a fairly aggressive kill-it-with-bleach approach to laundry. I wondered if there was a wallmart version aimed at people who stay in seedy motels where it would seem to be more practical.
There are brand ones that are rather expensive, but at least in Europe I know that decathlon makes really cheap silk and cotton sleeping bag liners, because that's where I got mine.
They are made to go into sleeping bags, and I love mine for that use case (less sweat and dirt in your down bag), but I have also used them in dirt cheap hostels.
In one seedy hotel in Italy several people in my party had a lot of bedbug bites, but I can't say for sure if it actually protected me. I expect I was probably just lucky that there were none in my room.
Still, it's a little over 100 grams (less than 4 ounces) and it makes dirty mattresses in shitty hostels bearable.
That said, as someone who travels a lot, when I look at travelers' catalogs like Magellan at a lot of the safety, germ protection, etc. items, part of me thinks that people who buy all that stuff are probably better off just not traveling.
They're definitely abusing the word 'most' there. I've stayed in easily 20 hostels at this point, and not once has a 'sleep sack' been required. And in all my hostel research, I have never stumbled across someone mentioning they needed one.
I don't think I have on the relatively limited occasions I've stayed in a hostel (or a mountain hut). That said, I'd certainly heard of sleep sacks sometimes being used/required in hostels. So it can't be all that rare--or maybe it used to be more common.
Makes sense I guess although I've never run into that requirement.
By description the thing she had was much smaller & more form fitting than above link. One of the "selling points" was how small it packed into carry-on, for example.
The sleaze of the mattress industry is a major reason the mattress in a box business has done so well. I just love when these kinds of markets get disrupted because the disdain these companies have for their own customers is infuriating (see also taxi industry).
>The sleaze of the mattress industry is a major reason the mattress in a box business has done so well.
Don't be fooled if you thought the traditional mattress buying experience was sleazy (similar to a car buying experience), the mattress in a box online dark patterns take sleaze to a whole other level.
I have to say my experience was very good in that regard, possibly because I went with the most respected brand in my country (Canada) and the industry is much less crowded/competitive here.
Having said that, I bought the mattress over 2 years ago now so maybe things have changed. I hate dark patterns with a fiery passion.
I'm also somewhat suspicious that foam mattresses are quite bad for your health, not necessarily from a sleep mechanics perspective, but from an air quality one. I mean you are literally sleeping on a piece of plastic that is optimized for surface area. You then squish it constantly while using it and inhale those aerosolized plastic particles for about 8 hours per day.
There are latex foam mattresses. I've purchased two from Sleep on Latex (sleeponlatex.com, or Pure Green on Amazon).
That said, whether latex, polyurethane, or whatever, with foam mattresses you're supposed to use a mattress protector to prevent sweat and accidents from soiling the foam. Alternatively or in addition to that, Sleep on Latex uses a wool topper, as I'm sure many other brands do. And then on top of that most people use sheets. I would think all of that covering would trap any particles so they can conveniently be washed out to sea with all the other microplastics from the laundry.
Unfortunately while off-gassing is a legitimate concern (particularly in poorly ventilated rooms) it is harder and harder to avoid, as spring mattresses now also often contain one or several layers of foam.
I'd like to see some high quality research on this using realistic test environments, or even monitoring in actual bedrooms. I don't know who is willing to fund that though.
Ofgassing in the first few weeks or so may expose you to harmful chemicals, but I don't see any reason for foam the to degrade into fine particulate if it isn't exposed to UV, assuming it isn't made of total garbage.
Everything we touch/eat is plastic/comes in contact with plastic to some degree, your shoes, clothes, bread sits in plastic for days, vegetables for months, etc.
I really doubt a bed wrapped in some form of cloth is any worse.
Unless you live on mars you are most likely getting ten times more pollution/plastic from other areas then your foam mattress.
I paid a little extra (~$600) for a foam mattress manufactured in California. I figured there is a lower chance of harmful offgassing than the cheaper Chinese mattresses like Zinus. I don't have any way to test that though.
I gotta admit, there's one tiny bit of this that I think is kinda cool: the secondary "Sharetown" ecosystem does sound like an "afterburner" of sorts for unused product, and I much rather see products be up-or-re-cycled than tossed in landfill. I think there is a much larger market for this, especially as TFA says about the huge increase in returns.
Hehe, true, but supposedly the room is somewhat sanitized.
There's an old Dutch saying "in de aap gelogeerd zijn". It means you got got scammed / got tricked / are in trouble. Literally, it means you "stayed at the ape".
As the story goes, the original meaning is that there was a hotel in Amsterdam (at Zeedijk 1) which was called "'t Aepjen" (old Dutch for "the ape"), where you stayed. Because Dutch East India Company (VOC) seamen couldn't pay their bills they paid with an ape. So if someone who was scratching themselves, the question was raised: "did you stay in 't Aepjen" (or in Dutch "ben je in de aap gelogeerd?").
Another version is that it was a pub (the oldest one in Amsterdam) where drunks met, and recruiters took advantage of this to get people to sign contracts (to subscribe for VOC).
At least, until I found something I liked. I purchased a Purple 3, thinking that if I loved it, I'd just stick with it. I did love it, but I couldn't justify spending $2k on a twin(!). I returned it, and purchased from another company for ~$700. I didn't like it as much as the Purple, but when I went to begin the return, I was told that there was no return process, and that I could "move the mattress to a different room, or donate it." Two days later, I received a refund for the full purchase amount. That ended my journey; no awesome mattress at any price beats "decent and free."
As much as I appreciate getting a new mattress for zilch, the experience made me extremely wary. Was my mattress so cheaply-made that the manufacturer could afford to give them away? What was up? So I did some research. It turns out that the mattress industry is a racket. The markups are ludicrous; almost every mattress on the market costs, at most, a few hundred dollars to make. And then it's also impossible to comparison shop because "models" differ based on retailer by one or two small features; that means no price-matching, if you can even tell what you're buying.
These are the kinds of things that make people suspicious of the way the economy is set up. It should be easy to find out what you're purchasing, and then to pay a fair price for it. Instead you have entire manufacturing-retail chains built on obfuscation and able to eat untold amounts in lost product.