Joseph Geierman

Prior to this purchase, I did not have much mattress shopping experience. When we purchased our old soft-side waterbed in 2001, it was a pretty cut and dry episode. My partner and I went in to a store & picked it out. It only cost a few hundred dollars, and the sales guy barely talked to us. When buying our next bed, about 5 years later, we already had our minds set on a sleep number bed. We went into the sleep number store at the mall, lay on a few beds, and ended up picking out one of the lower-end models. It was an OK experience. There was not a lot of negotiating involved that time either, from what I can remember.

I really liked the waterbed, but its downsides were that it was too hot for me & very heavy to move. The sleep number bed is easier to move (it’s filled with air), but I never thought it was as comfortable. It also developed sag between the two sleep chambers, which I inevitably seem to roll into. The sleep number bed was made more acceptable when we traded out the egg crate foam inside with some memory foam purchased from the internet. We had slept on a memory foam topper at my dad’s house, which I thought was one of the most comfortable sleep experiences I have had, and that was our starting place in purchasing a new mattress.

I started off trying to do a little research on highly rated foam mattresses. There are not really a lot of mattress reviews out there, so I kept coming back to the Apartment Therapy “A Year in Bed” series that reviews a different mattress each month. The reviewer there mentioned a couple of latex beds that were at the top of his list, and we figured that was a good starting point for us to check out. We went on the websites for the companies that make those beds, and identified some stores that sell the brand.

We went to those stores on a Saturday morning. When we walked in, I asked the sales guy who came up to us if he had the Danny Seo latex bed – he didn’t know what I was talking about, but showed us his latex mattress collection. He kept up a constant stream of sales banter while we lay on the 2 latex mattresses there. Both were kind of springy and didn’t have a lot of edge support. I asked him about memory foam, and he showed us the TempurPedic and ComforPedic beds.

Of course we had heard and read about TempurPedic before. To some extent, they are synonymous with memory foam in general. I had heard that they are pretty warm to sleep on, though, and the way we just sank into the bed and stayed there was kind of weird. We tried the ComforPedic next, and there was a lot more “bounce” and responsiveness to them. It was pretty obvious that we were interested in the ComforPedic. The model we liked (the “Navina” – also known as the “Mystic” or “Respiro”) ran about $3500 list price. Immediately, the sales guy told us that Simmons would only let them take 20% off the bed’s list price – which I took as a way to tell us that the starting price was $2800.

I was not ready to really start negotiating for a mattress after having tried just a couple in one store, so we went to a different store a few blocks away, where I thought they would have some different latex mattresses. Once we got there, it appeared to have all the same mattresses at the place we’d just been at. When I told the sales guy, he said, “Oh yeah – we are owned by the same guy as that other place. We are just here to help steer customers away from pre-owned mattresses, which is what most of the other stores around here sell.”

While we were there, we spent some more time lying on the latex ComforPedic and TempurPedic mattresses. We both still liked the feel of the ComforPedics the best. Since both stores were owned by the same company, we got the same “I can only take 20% off” line. I liked the sales guy a little better, but we weren’t ready to commit to purchasing, and called it a day after that.

The following day, we went to Macy’s to check out their selection. Of course they had TempurPedic. The sales man steered us to a set of mattresses called Sealy Memoryworks. We weren’t too impressed, but saw one foam bed sitting by itself. We hopped on top of it & really liked it – we said, “wow – this is as good as the ComforPedic beds from yesterday.” When we looked at the name, it turned out it was a ComforPedic Loft Gel Touch – essentially a special mattress that Macy’s had made for its stores. It had a different mix of latex and memory foam, along with a layer of “cool gel.” I asked the sales guy how much we could get it discounted for, and he said 10% – so they were selling it for about $3200. We got the salesman’s business card and headed out.

After visiting 3 different stores and discovering that we liked the ComforPedic line in each one, we started really focusing in on that brand. It turns out that Simmons has a factory store in Atlanta. They sell discontinued and overstock mattresses that were never slept on. What I read online sounded like you could get half price or more off the mattresses. We went one weekend morning, and while they did have a few ComforPedics, the woman who was there said that they rarely get king size mattresses of any type. Kings are made to order, so it is rare for one to be made but not be delivered to the end-user. We crossed that idea off our list.

When I was younger, I would have probably considered a mattress that had been used slightly and then returned. These days, though, I am not really that adventurous. There are too many stories about people getting bed bugs from used mattresses or hidden dirt and mold. I’m not willing to risk it.

When I was researching ComforPedics, the sites I kept coming to were Craig’s Beds and Grateful Beds – sister sites run by a guy who runs a mattress store in NYC. I sent them an e-mail asking for an “online coupon” and got a call from Craig (the owner) the following day. We talked about the mattresses for about 10 minutes. It was an easy conversation. He told me that he liked selling mattresses over the Internet, because people he dealt with typically knew what they wanted. He had a lot fewer returns that way.

We talked price – I ended up getting a good one; paying significantly less than “list,” and also less than the discount the guys in the brick & mortar stores offered. I was able to think it over & call back to let him know my answer – which was “I’ll take it!” I paid & then received a notice a few days later about when the mattress would be shipped to me. It was being manufactured to my specifications (King Size, etc), so it wasn’t sitting in a warehouse somewhere. It took a few weeks, but I felt good knowing that the mattress hadn’t been sitting on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere or possibly even returned.