dn, I see your point, but
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I paid $440 plus tax on 8/1/1994 for a Sealy Eden Pillowtop. That’s equivalent to $693 today. The mattress lasted 18 years = $38.50/year in 2013 dollars.
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I paid $461 plus tax on 2/18/2012 for a Sealy Cason Bay Ti Firm Pillowtop. That’s equivalent to $469 today. The mattress lasted 1.5 years or $307.33/year in 2013 dollars, about 8 times the cost of the previous model.
Yes, my bad for still having that $500 figure in mind when I went shopping in 2011. But somehow I don’t think I would have gotten a mattress 8 times better if I had been thinking $700.
The main issue seems to be the extra top layers of polyfoam. I thought I had heard something about new foams being petroleum-based (by law?) but in this post, Phoenix makes a good argument for it going back to Simmons’ successful introduction of the one-sided mattress.