Hi sdonaher1981,
Take some time and read through the mattress shopping tutorial link I provided in my earlier email. It outlines the steps you should take in shopping for a new mattress.
The job of the salesperson is to “sell” uo on a certain mattress, and “being sold” is not what you want. Unless they were providing you information about the actual materials within the mattress and speaking specifically about the density and actual makeup of the materials, most of what you were told was more than likely regurgitation of marketing material with little meaningful information provided.
As for reviews or other people’s experiences in general, they won’t tell you much if anything about the suitability, quality, durability, or “value” of a mattress for any particular person (see post #13 here), and I recommend you avoid considering them as any sort of a reliable indicator of the appropriateness of any particular product for your needs.
Larger brands and the stores that offer their products commonly rely upon the lack of information and state of confusion that they find in most consumers, and they exploit this with general marketing clichés. I recommend that you read through the material to which I’ve linked and use it as a reference and not attempt to memorize things, but learn enough to recognize a product using better quality materials or a retailer that is knowledgeable and honest so that you may trust the information you’re presented.
Phoenix