Hi Tbrady,
There isn’t any standard definition or meaning or consistency for various mattress firmness ratings between manufacturers and each person can have very different perceptions of the same mattress and what is too firm for one person can be too soft for the next so your own definition of “mid-firm” based on your own actual testing or sleeping experience would be more important than anything else or how anyone else “rates” the firmness of a mattress.
While nothing has perfect results and there are always exceptions … for most people, careful and objective testing using the testing guidelines in the tutorial post can usually do a good job of predicting their longer term experience on a mattress and it doesn’t need to wait for the actual experience of pain or discomfort to know that you may feel pain or discomfort over the course of the night. For example it wouldn’t take longer than a few seconds to know that the floor didn’t have good support/alignment and would likely cause pressure issues as well. On the other hand … testing a mattress for a few minutes in a showroom for the more subjective perception of “comfort” or the “showroom feel” can have lower odds of success than random chance alone (see this study). Careful and specific testing for PPP (again using the testing guidelines in the tutorial) will usually be “close enough” that only minor fine tuning is necessary (if anything is necessary at all) when you actually sleep on the mattress.
While you may still experience some “symptoms” when a mattress is brand new … they will tend to lessen until they confirm your testing experience (assuming you tested a mattress carefully and objectively for PPP) as the mattress breaks in and you adjust to a new sleeping surface. Once a mattress has broken in and you have adjusted to your new mattress and your sleeping experience is more consistent … then knowing the quality and durability of the materials in the mattress is the biggest part of predicting how the mattress will perform over the following years. Higher quality more durable materials will stay closer to their original specifications and result in higher quality sleep for a much longer time before you begin to “tolerate” the mattress instead of sleeping well on it than lower quality materials which may only provide good PPP for a few years (or in some cases only a few months).
Having said that … if you are one of those that is much closer to the “princess and the pea” end of the scale than the “I can sleep on anything” end of the scale or have specific situations or health conditions that may make your testing less reliable or if for any reason you have little confidence in your testing, then the options you have after a purchase and the return or exchange policies of the store will become a more important part of your personal value equation so that if your first choice doesn’t work out as well as you hoped that you still have good options available to you after a purchase if your choice isn’t as suitable as you (and the store) hoped for. While stores that offer return or exchange options build the cost of this into their mattresses (the people who don’t return or exchange a mattress pay for the ones who do) … for some people this kind of insurance can be very important but I would never use a return or exchange policy to replace good testing and I would always choose a mattress as if I had only one chance to choose the “right” one.
It’s also less risky to choose a mattress that errs on the side of being a little too firm because you can always add more pressure relief or “comfort” with a mattress pad or a topper but if you choose a mattress that is too soft then there may be no good options to “fix it” because you would need to remove and/or replace some of the foam or materials inside the comfort layers rather than adding a topper on top of it.
It’s very unlikely that the Pamper would be too soft for most people because it’s one of their firmest choices.
Phoenix