My spouse and I are finally getting a new mattress. Yay! After months of backaches, it occurred to me the problem wasn’t just my age, but the mattress too. We do have a local mattress company in which to try out beds. They sell everything from innerspring to latex, unfortunately the mattresses are priced out of our budget compared to what we can find online (taxes and shipping add about 100 to our price). We liked latex over innerspring, but also found the latex (talalay) over foam comfortable as well. So, what I’m wondering is if we try a mattress at this local place, can we generalize the comfort we feel at this showroom to a mattress online, assuming that the layers are similar. Or is it just a case of calling and talking to someone on the phone.
As you can tell, we need a more value priced Queen mattress. At this point, I’m thinking of the Dreamfoam Ultimate Dreams, the Tuft & Needle bed with a soft topper, or maybe even a Spindle Abscond blended latex. I know they are all quite different types of beds, which is why I’m not sure how to figure out which one will work the best for us in terms of PPP. A
It can be very difficult to try and “match” a mattress you’ve tried in a showroom to one that you are considering online because the effect of even seemingly small differences between them can be surprising and can make a bigger difference between two mattresses than many people would suspect. Any differences in the type of materials or components, the layer thicknesses, the firmness of each layer, the type of cover and quilting materials, or the overall design can be either cumulative (where several differences make a bigger difference in the mattress as a whole) or can offset each other (where two differences can offset each other and have a very similar end result).
There is more in post #9 here about “matching” one mattress to another but to do this you would need to know all the specs of a mattress you were trying to match and the mattress you were considering would need to have all the same specs or the differences would need to offset each other. Every layer of a mattress will have some effect on the feel and performance of all the other layers and the mattress as a whole.
What this boils down to is that the more information you can provide about your “target” mattress (and all the information you need may not be available), your specific experience in testing it in terms of PPP, and your body type, sleeping positions, and preferences … the better an online retailer or manufacturer may be able to use it as a reference point which along with their knowledge of their own mattresses can help them help you to make the best possible choice out of the options they offer.
While it’s unlikely that you will find a local mattress that is exactly the same as an online mattress, your local testing on “similar” or even “somewhat similar” mattresses can still provide some useful reference points and guidelines when you have more detailed conversations with an online retailer or manufacturer on the phone about their options that have the best chance of working well for you.