By Holly Kozelsky
It’s no fun buying a pig in a poke and spending more than $1,000 doing so.
That’s what it is to buy a mattress.
In the mattress store, you are a bug under a magnifying glass.
It’s deathly quiet. There’s no other customer there. For all you know, there hasn’t been any customer all day or even all week.
The energetic salesperson approaches, smile pasted on his face.
Tag – you’re it?
The salesperson doesn’t talk to you about the product. Instead, he talks to you about yourself. Good luck telling him what you want. He’s trying harder to find out how much money you have.
Looking around, you are confronted by a sea of products that all look just alike.
You can’t even see the mattresses for sale because each is zipped up in some kind of quilted cover.
The only difference comes from little signs on top of or beside some of them.
Price tags are hidden; they are sewn on the mattress cover.
Logic would say that to choose a mattress, you should lie down on various options for around 15 minutes each to compare them.
It’s embarrassing enough to lie down in public for a minute, let alone 15.
And the time! Should we take a day off work to go from one mattress to the next, lying on each for 15 minutes, reading a book to pass the time?
The mattress store claims to have the solution. They have a special bed machine that you lie on, and it gives you a specific pressure point combination that you would match a mattress to.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked, because yes, I was the uncomfortable shopper.
“The body has different pressure points,” he cheerfully explained. “For example, when you lie down on the tester, it shows you that your hips and butt sink lower into the mattress because they are larger and heavier, and the ankles sink less into the bed because they are smaller and lighter.”
“We can figure that out without laying on a machine,” I replied; and what I didn’t add: What are we supposed to do, buy one mattress for the butt and another for the ankles?
“These are expensive,” I said, once I figured out where to find the hidden price tags. “I’ll just come back when there’s a sale.”
“No worries!” he replied cheerfully. “Corporate had given me the authority to match any sales price.”
Humph. When everything is on sale all the time, nothing is on sale.
Ever since the idea of getting a new mattress has been in my head, I have been nursing a major regret. A year or two ago I slept the best night in my life, enough so that I sought out a hotel manager the next day and complimented the bed.
Why oh why did I not pull back the sheets and look at the mattress label?
However, I have the next best thing: Consumer Reports at the Martinsville library (ask at the front desk) and Wirecutter (which is part of my New York Times subscription). Each of those reviews and ranks products.
I have consulted those two sources for years in preparation for purchases.
It’s such a relief to be able to depend on research rather than having to listen to a slick-talking salesman while lying on a weird bed machine.
