Hi jaswhite,
I believe they purchased the memoryfoam.com site from Mark quite some time ago.
Post #2 here also talks about some of the questions you have mentioned.
You can also see some of their other sites (including Brickell which is their bricks and mortar store in Florida) in the members list here. I’m not sure why having multiple sites with a different focus would be an issue.
You could probably get better answers directly from them (and they’d be happy to address any of your questions) but I’ll make a few comments as “poor substitute”.
The memoryfoam.com site has their previous lineup that used memory foam and the selectfoam.com site has their new lineup that uses gel memory foam which is a more recent introduction. The Select Foam site is the “correct” one with their up to date information.
Some manufacturers may do this and some don’t. I don’t think most consumers would have the knowledge to be able to tell good memory foam from bad anyway to really make it worthwhile and in their case you have a money back guarantee with return shipping paid which would be a much more meaningful test than any small sample (which would tell you nothing about how a mattress sleeps) so perhaps it made more sense to them to go in this direction and not add the cost of packaging and shipping free samples into the mattress (or somewhere). This is a business decision that each business would make based on their thoughts about whether something makes sense to them from a business and cost point of view and like all business decisions some may think differently than others. The same would hold true about other options or benefits that each manufacture chooses to offer that other manufacturers may not because they each may believe differently about whether the cost justifies the benefit.
Besides the post I linked earlier, you can see some of my thoughts about the BBB in post #4 here (and post #3 before it with another members experience with them) and post #4 here (both of which talked about Select Foam). One of the other members of this site for years refused to become a member of the BBB on principle alone (many businesses don’t think highly of the BBB and their methods at all) and had an “F” rating because of one complaint that they didn’t even know about. Once they became a member … their rating changed from an F to an A overnight. This is “normal procedure” for the BBB.
I don’t consider anything you have posted as 'bad" or something that shouldn’t be on the forum. Buying a website from someone else that they believed would help their business or introducing a new mattress line with similar specs and feel as the old one and keeping the name for consistency would not be issues for me. I can understand how some people who don’t really know how the BBB works could consider this an issue (unless they look at the low number of unresolved complaints) but each of us needs to decide what is most important to us and what to pay attention to as part of our own “value equation”. For me, how businesses deal with the inevitable complaints they have (some justified and some not) and how they deal with the issues and challenges that come up in any business provides much more insight into the business and people than some of the things you mentioned but each of us as individuals may have different ideas about how to decide who to deal with.
There are many ways a mattress could be 'similar to Tempurpedic". One of these is the “feel” of a mattress which may use different materials. Another is the design of a mattress that may use the same quality/density materials and layering but have a very different feel. Many online merchants compare themselves to Tempurpedic simply because they know that consumers think that 'memory foam is memory foam" and they can get away with it. Some manufacturers are “similar” in both design and layering and feel which would be Select Foam (they refine their mattresses based on the feedback they get from their customers in side by side testing at Brickell where they are both on the floor).
A few of the better options for online memory foam mattresses are in post #12 here and if you call some of these most of them could tell you which of their mattresses are most similar to various Tempurpedic models and some may even be able to custom build a memory foam mattress with any layering you wish. Of course there are many more than this small list but they are some of the ones that meet my memory foam criteria in post #10 here and I believe have good quality/value.
Phoenix