First of all, I would like to thank you for the wealth of information that is on this site. I have spent hours upon hours reading the articles and forum posts and feel much more equipped to make a mattress purchase now than I ever have. My husband and I visited a chain store about a week ago and quickly realized (as you suggest) that I knew much more about the mattresses than the salesman did. We inquired about a full latex mattress, which in return were told that latex is so expensive that it would cost upwards of $10,000 to get a full latex mattress. He proceeded to show us the two mattresses in the store that contained latex – one with 0.79 inches of latex, the other with a little over an inch – and explained that these two mattresses cost so much ($3500-4000) because of just the small amount of latex. We laid on a variety of mattresses in the store to determine what initial preferences we had, but needless to say… we walked out of the store without a mattress.
We are leaning towards an all latex mattress based on the factors that I have read on this site. We are not against purchasing a mattress online, but I would really like to lay on a full latex or at least a comfort layer that is full latex before making our purchase. We live in SE Kentucky (40769) and I haven’t been able to find any retailers near us that carry either of these things. However, we frequently go to Knoxville, TN and I’m hoping that we are able to test out what we are looking for in that area. I have seen post #2 here that lists the manufacturers/retailers in Knoxville, but just wanted to be sure that there were not any other places listed anywhere else on the forum that I may have missed.
I look forward to finding our perfect mattress and reviewing it here for others once we decide!