Hi pinupchick,
The industry has changed quite dramatically in the last 15 years or so. Several of the biggest changes include the era of leveraged buyouts (at all levels of the industry) which has created a lot of debt and pressure on profit margins (resulting in a lot of research about how to use cheaper and less durable materials to simulate the performance of more expensive materials), a shift in the industry towards chain stores and mass marketing of mattresses (also advertising driven) which has a focus on profit margin rather than consumer accountability and quality, and changes in design including the switch from two-sided mattresses to mostly one-sided which was started by Simmons a little over a decade ago and a continuing trend towards the use of lower quality materials. Regulatory issues such as the 1633 fire regulations that came into effect in 2007 have played a part as well adding to the price of a mattress (and because of the cost of prototyping a mattress to pass the regulations has also been a major factor in some local manufacturers going out of business). While polyfoam has been around for a long time … there have also been changes here as regulatory and environmental issues have put some restrictions on how it can be manufactured and the chemicals and methods that can be used which have also added to costs and often resulted in lower quality to meet pricing targets demanded by the larger retailers.
The market and economic conditions have changed as well resulting in different types of pressures as consumers have often lost sight of the distinction between price and value in their efforts to buy everything as “cheap” as possible.
In all of this … the major companies have relied more and more on advertising and have become less accountable to customers and more accountable to shareholders and the increasing demands on profit margins and market share. The advertising-driven market share of the top 15 brands (in conjunction with the mass market retailers which mostly carry them) has steadily increased till now it’s at about 86% and the several hundred independent and local manufacturers are sharing about 14% of the market. This is a big increase from a couple of decades ago (Note: as you can see here as of 2012 it is up to 87%). In 2013 this percentage is up to 90.6%.
2020+ Update: We are happy to see the trend reversing with market shares now at 66.8% for major manufacturers and 33. 2% for smaller regional manufacturers.
eCommerce is a great factor in changing the scales as well as the consumers applying pressure on larger companies to provide the Mattress Specifications You Need To Know to be able to compare them to the Mattress Durability Guidelines
So yes there have been some substantial qualitative issues and the mattresses that you buy from the major manufacturers, in general, are much lower quality than they were 15 - 20 years ago and the process of continuing to confuse and mislead consumers, make mattresses with built-in obsolescence built into their design, and not disclose meaningful information about the materials that make meaningful quality and value comparisons increasingly difficult is now the norm.
There is no other industry that I’m aware of that, where consumers as a whole are so willing to make a major purchase with so little or in many cases no meaningful information about the actual quality of what they are buying. It’s so bad that if you have the “nerve” to ask about foam density in most of the larger stores they will look at you like you’re crazy and tell you that “nobody asks those questions” which is their justification for why they don’t have an answer. The other most frequent comments you will get it that “it just confuses people” or “only engineers need to know that”. Go figure … the most important questions that a consumer can ask about the quality of their mattress and outside of the rare consumers that have taken the time to learn … nobody is asking it! Even worse … outside of smaller independent manufacturers … very few are willing to provide the answers even if they are asked.
Phoenix