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.
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.