Old Bed Guy- The Truth about Buying Beds and Mattresses. Your complete guide to buying the perfect mattress. Must Read Posts For All Mattress Shoppers Need help buying a mattress? Read the Consumer Reports Innerspring Mattress Ratings: Click here A MUST READ BOTH FOR ALL SURVEY TAKERS AND USEFUL FOR SHOPPERS ON THEIR OWN. Welcome to my Old Bed Guy website. I named this essay, “Mattress 103” because my intent is to provide you with an information-packed introduction to intelligent mattress shopping. I could’ve called it “Mattress shopping made easy”. But shopping for such a “blind item” is never that easy, even for a so-called expert like myself. Your chances for finding what you need will be significantly improved when you are armed with facts you will learn in this essay. You are reading this because you need a new mattress and find the shopping process uncomfortable, unpleasant, or hard to understand. Or often all three and more. Mattress makers and retailers deliberately make the buying process more difficult.
The less that you know, the more money that they can make. If they let you discover how little difference there often is between many mattresses, profits will go down the drain. There are quality differences, but not as great as the price differences. My mission is to make it easier for you to be able to judge.... Tests and results from a reliable source... If nature abhors a vacuum, opportunists are always ready to make money by exploiting the fears to be found in the minds of almost all mattress shoppers. And that is the message I am trying to impart in this post. The mattress industry as a whole, has intentionally made it as hard as possible to comparison shop for a mattress.... Obsessively engineered for outrageous comfort, our mattress, sheets, and pillow work together to create a sleep environment that loves you back. No wonder the Casper has won so many awards. ONE OF TIME’S 25 BEST INVENTIONS OF 2015 FAST COMPANY INNOVATION BY DESIGN FINALIST 2015
BIG INNOVATION AWARD 2016 Obsessively engineered for outrageous comfort, our mattress, sheets, and pillow work together to create a sleep environment that loves you back. INTRODUCING THE NEW CASPER DOG MATTRESS Sleep on it, lounge on it, dream on it — if you don’t love your Casper product, we’ll take it back and give you a full refund.“People buy shoes online even though you can’t try them on… a mattress is no different, right?” Faced with buying a new mattress two years ago, I uttered these words to Mrs. Frugalwoods and then embarked on a frugal slumber experiment. My goal was to see if my wife and I could buy a mattress online, save tons of money, and still get a great night’s sleep. Let’s start at the beginning. Mrs. Frugalwoods is what we would lovingly call an “active sleeper.” She is a tiny woman with powerful kicking legs. Must be all that yoga. We had a double bed for the first several years of our marriage and I have the scars to prove it!
So when we moved back to the Northeast a few years ago, getting a bed large enough to provide Mrs. Frugalwoods with room to roam and myself to sleep without being pummeled was on the top of my list. And holy mother-of-pillowtop are king sized mattresses expensive! This low-end tempurpedic is $2,400! Our car isn’t worth $2,400! The Mrs. and I saw those prices and were not impressed. It also quickly became apparent that mattresses are extremely profitable and sold in a manner similar to used cars. I do not need a salesperson to assist me, thank you very much. But we really needed a mattress. So we made a list of our snoozing requirements and asked the internet. anyway (gloves for hound teeth brushing, for example) so it was a natural place to start looking. Turns out, they have an entire mattress section. After reading through a bunch of the firm mattress reviews, we settled on the LUCID 8″ Memory Foam Mattress. It checked all the boxes and 2 years ago was only $279 for the king size.
Plus, and this is the really crazy part, Prime Shipping! That’s right, Amazon shipped a king sized mattress to our door in a mere 2 days from ordering it, FOR FREE. When it arrived, we warily eyeballed the heavy, awkward, long tube that the mattresses was vacuum packed into. The box was plastered with warnings to put the box in the room where you want the mattress before opening it and releasing the tightly coiled foam. We carefully put the box in the bedroom and then slit the straining plastic holding back the surging foam mattress. As dramatic as it sounds (and as we had imagined it), in reality the foam just slowly unrolled itself and started gaining the shape of a mattress. Did it smell a little “new car-ish” (for lack of a better term)? Yes, but it wasn’t overwhelming. The box suggested leaving the windows open for a few hours while the foam attained its shape. We opened the box when we got home from work and by the time we were ready to go to bed, the smell was no longer noticeable.
So how does a $279 mattress from the internet feel? I actually remember chuckling as I lay down for the first time. We picked the 8″ version specifically because it was the firmest (they also make 10″ and 12″ which are softer) and wow does it deliver. Firm but comfy and extremely supportive of our backs. Two years later, internet mattress is still firm and supportive! Since this mattress has foam layered in a specific order, you can’t flip it but you can rotate it. We do that every 6 months to try and keep the wear level the same. So far I haven’t noticed any significant settling of the foam. One of the things I was most concerned about was how it would feel during the summer. I’d heard from some people that memory foam can hold the heat next to your body. In practice we haven’t noticed any additional heat. In short, it’s been a great mattress and we expect to get many more years of good sleep on it! Over the past two years, I’ve evangelized buying a mattress from Amazon to coworkers and friends, several of whom have bought the same or similar mattresses.