Please help finding the right mattress!

[phoenix]

Hi northeastconfederate,

Hello, I have just come from mattress shooping & am just as frustrated as I have been every time I have done this. And my wife & I have done it about a half dozen times in the past 13 years! That is WAY too much when the products supposedly have a 15 or 20 year warranty! I’ve been looking at Tempurpedic Cloud Luxe and an icomfort bed, supposedly equivalent. The reading I’ve done so far on this site confirm what I believed, that both of these products are vastly overpriced. A condition that I believe applies to all mattresses, based on my consistently bad experiences with them.

Unfortunately you are not alone. There are many who believe (and quite justifiably so) that shopping for a mattress is more difficult and more loaded with traps and less than ethical or knowledgeable outlets than shopping for a used car. This article (if you haven’t read it already) will help you avoid most of the worst choices so you can focus on the better ones and not waste a lot of time in chain stores or look at major brand mattresses. As you have also discovered … warranties have little to nothing to do with how long a mattress will last and are mostly used as a marketing tool to “upsell” more expensive mattresses. They don’t cover the loss of comfort or support which is the main reason people need to buy a new mattress and warranty exclusions generally make sure that only a small percentage of warranty claims are successful anyway.

Rather than post what I think I want, I will start as I have with both salespeople and ask for recommendations based on my experience & needs. I was in sales, and was very knowledgeable about the product I sold, and so could truly help a customer get what he or she needed, and hoped to get the same from these mattress salespeople. Unfortunately I haven’t !

The “best” first step is to first research and discover the better local manufacturers and local outlets that have the knowledge, skill, and experience, along with the value of their mattresses to help you make great choices. Trying to build a mattress by “specs” is one of the least effective methods of deciding on what may work for you. While there are some general weight/height guidelines here along with some sleeping positions guidelines here and an outline of how different types of mattress construction can affect both of these in this overview here (and more detail in the various pages in this section) … this can become very complex and I would use these as general guidelines that can help you ask better questions and better tell the difference between salespeople who are feeding you “stories” and those who have the experience and knowledge to help educate you and are genuinely interested in helping you make better choices than they are adding to their commissions or the profit margins of the outlet. As you know from being in sales yourself … if you find the “right” people to help you … the choice of the best product that hey have available and that best “fits” your needs and preferences is almost a certainty. If you are working with the “wrong” people or in most mass market outlets … then it’s likely that none of your choices will be good ones.

I have one saleswoman wanting to sell me a Tempurpedic Cloud Luxe, to the tune of &4200 or so, and a salesman across the street (who also has Tempurpedic on his floor ) wanting to sell me an icomfort. I cannot come to terms with spending >$4000 on a mattress and I’ve just read Phoenix describe durability issues with the icomfort. And, despite its price being roughly 60% of the TP, it, especially in light of the durability issues, this doesn’t seem like a good choice, either.

Both of these are in the group of “major brands” that i would consider to have poor value … although for different reasons. the Tempurpedics mostly (except for the Simplicity line) have good quality but poor value. The iSerta uses ower quality materials and also has poor value.

We are in the Las Vegas area, and while mattress stores abound, I have no faith that I am getting a good product that will last even 5 years.

Some of your better choices that I’m aware of in the Las Vegas area are in post #2 here.

The other factor is that we are planning to put this mattress on a “platform bed” with no box spring beneath it. The furniture salesmen tell me the many slats that support the mattress make a box spring unnecessary. I question this, but don’t know if it is or isn’t true.

This is true and a slatted platform bed (with slats no more than 3" apart which most have) are a good choice both for support and ventilation of the mattress.

Finally there is a list of online manufacturers that are members of this site in post #21 here that can act as value “reference points” for a local purchase and depending on the “value” that you encounter locally may also be well worth including in your research for a possible purchase using your local testing as a guideline.

Hope this helps as a starting point and feel free to post with any questions you may have along the way.

At least this time you will be “armed” with the information you will need to make sure this is the last time you will need to buy a mattress for a much longer time

Phoenix