I was taking my time and thought I was doing good “research” on our upcoming mattress purchase. I research the heck out of electronics purchases before I settle on “the one”, and yet I’m not going to lay my body on my laptop or tablet for several hours each and every night for the next 10 years. So I thought I should at least do a decent effort at doing a similar level of research for our next mattress.
I came very close to having us purchase a BedInABox mattress. I even drove 1.5 hours (each way) to a retailer that carries them so I could try them out in person. They were comfortable, and I found a couple I “liked” the feel of. And I thought I’d even have the benefits of working with a “local” dealer. So I was planning on taking my wife for the 1.5/1.5 drive on Saturday to see what she thought.
But since I had firmly entrenched myself into my obsessive “product research mode”, I decided spend my evenings before Saturday doing a more research.
So glad I did! Because that was the point that I discovered this site. What a wealth of information! I didn’t realize I could find out this much about how to choose a mattress… because I never thought that there was anywhere close to this much to find out about choosing a mattress. 
Needless to say, I scrapped what I thought I “knew” about choosing a mattress and started over with The Mattress Shopping Tutorial (and many of the informative links that spur off of it).
We’re now looking at going with a latex mattresses. (I always thought they were the “expensive” models and out of our price range, so I never considered them. Which was reinforced by some chain store salesmen who said as much… because the latex mattresses they carried were out of our price range.) By following the information on here I’ve realized that with a local, high-quality manufacturer we can get a good quality/durability latex mattress for about the same price we would have paid on many of the (questionable quality/durability) memory foam mattresses we were previously considering.
Today I took a long lunch and visited The Mattress Factory in Fort Worth, Texas and had a great experience.
There were two latex mattresses on the showroom floor that were close for my comfort and support preference, but both were just slightly off from what I’d really prefer. Peter made a couple suggestions of what he could do to tweak those mattresses a bit, and he put some latex pieces on top of the mattresses for me to lay on in order to give me a general idea of the changes his suggestions would make. I love that he’s willing to customize/tweak a mattresses to improve it’s comfort for me. (I’ve always assumed when buying mattresses that I just had to settle for the model on the showroom floor that was “close enough” for me.)
Peter was very pleasant, helpful, obviously knew his stuff, and not pushy at all. (Nothing at all like the chain store salesmen I’d been enduring the past few weeks.)
Based on my experience today, I’m definitely planning to return with my wife to see if we can find a mattress there that meets her PPP.
Thanks for this great site, with all it’s great info!
I’ll post what we finally purchase. (And whether it’s with The Mattress Factory, or with one of the other local manufacturers).