7 tips not to be fooled by buying your mattress

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Want to buy a mattress? Good idea if yours is already more than ten years old. You will sleep better, at least a little bit. On the other hand, hello sleepless nights! How indeed to choose so much the offer is plethoric? Opt for natural latex, polyurethane foam or merino wool? For Dunlopillo, Epeda, or Treca? From Conforama, Ikea or La Compagnie du Lit? To believe that the mattress industry has contrived to complicate our lives. There is some truth. There is even a term to describe the world that darkens before the overflow of information delivered to the consumer: “offuscation”. A way to make him pay more. To avoid sleepless nights, you will find below seven practical tips for choosing your mattress.

For the first purchase of mattresses, the problem does not seem too complicated yet. We're young, we're moving in, the budget is tight, we don't have back pain, or light sleepers. And buying online is a quasi-reflex. The idea of ​​receiving a compressed mattress in a package and seeing it unfold like in the Capster or Tediber videos can be experienced as a cool experience, and even to be shared on social networks.

Millennials love disruptors. Mattress Firm, the largest American bedding merchant and its thousands of stores, would not have thought of applying vacuum compression technology to mattresses and delivering them rolled up in a cardboard box the size of a refrigerator. . Even if it had been imaginative, Mattress Firm, like the other distributors, would not have had any interest in developing this innovation. Why cannibalize part of its sales by offering simple mattresses at low prices and reduced margins?

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Explosion of online retailers

This is a classic story of disruption: innovators from elsewhere, entering from the bottom of the market, too neglected by incumbents, and developing an organization that reduces costs and prices. I described this well-known model in the article “Uberization of the mechanical razor”. Replace here Dollar Shave Club and its spare blades delivered at home twice cheaper than in store by Capster and its basic polyurethane mattress. Neither the mattresses nor the slats are manufactured by the distributor because it is supplied by the same suppliers as the sellers in the shop.

Seven years after this innovation, the choice is not that simple for young families. Dozens of online merchants now offer compressed mattresses delivered to your home. In the United States, nearly 200 have been identified. Which site to choose? What mattress too, because the sellers have extended their assortment? They all compete by seeking to differentiate their products and services, including on details such as the incorporation of horsehair, soy fibers or verbena microcapsules. The Vegan mattress has even made its appearance.

The online choice for the young household can always be the basic mattress at a low price. But here it is: it is made of polyurethane, a product derived from petroleum, and it contains a lot of more or less volatile and toxic chemical compounds. This does not fit well with the strong preferences of digital children for saving the planet. Also, be aware that buying a mattress in a cardboard box is not ideal for waste reduction. We are far from the canons of the circular economy.

Let's explain why. Since compressed mattresses cannot be tried before purchase, online distributors offer the possibility of return within 100 days, sometimes more. The mattress is taken back to the customer by a carrier. Free of charge and of course without asking that it be returned to its original packaging. An exercise as impossible as putting toothpaste in its tube. The return of a mattress is therefore expensive even though its rate is high, for lack of prior testing by the customer.

This disadvantage for online distribution is also for the environment. What to do with these mountains of used mattresses, even used only a few dozen days? Not much, except landfill. Recycling possibilities exist but they are limited. The same goes for reuse. Mattresses reconditioned after disinfection and various operations remain a confidential business and a niche market. The value of foam does not reach that of mobile phone components and zero-mite and zero-bedbug risk is difficult to guarantee.

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Change every ten years

Also note that the explosion in the number of online distributors allows those indifferent to the fate of the planet to change mattresses every three months without paying a single euro. The existence of twenty independent sellers already guarantees little more than five years of free new mattresses at home for non-ecological smarties.

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Even if you're a digital kid, I suggest you try out your mattress in the store. It has become all the easier as many online stores now have a storefront. For example, if you're from Paris, go and test Tediber's mattresses in its store La club de nuit, a well-chosen brand name. If you live in Boston, try your Casper mattress at Targets, a partner bedding chain of the online retailer. Conversely, traditional distributors such as La Compagnie du Lit and Mattress Firm have developed their online sales of compressed mattresses. The border between the disruptors and the histories of the mattress is blurred.

Anyway, after their forties, the French like the Dutch will look for a new, more comfortable mattress. Their budget allows them to do so and above all their sleep is less deep, they fall asleep longer and the frequency of nocturnal awakenings is greater than during their youth. It is well established that the quality of sleep deteriorates with age. In addition, mattress manufacturers and merchants have been touting for years the comfort of their bedding and its positive, if not restorative, effects on the quality of sleep. Ditto for back pain and painful awakenings. Hence a profusion of multi-layer, multi-material mattresses, with a firm or soft reception, with shape memory, with pocket or biconical springs, with thermoregulating ticking, with a summer/winter sleeping surface, etc.

Being neither a sleep specialist nor a bedding specialist, it is difficult for me to comment on the effects of a new mattress. However, it seems that it reduces micro-awakenings and is perceived as beneficial by sleepers. This is one study among others carried out by the same professional bedding association in collaboration with hospital doctors. If you know more about the subject or have more varied sources and meta-studies, let me know by posting a comment.

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Fragrance of chamomile

Let's continue with the profusion of offers and the practices of obfuscation from mattress merchants who are more in my domain. As almost always for economic science, these phenomena have been analyzed in the United States, but in broad outline the observations and the results are valid for Europe and France. The obfuscation theory has its origins in the search costs that consumers incur to find out the price and quality of the good they wish to purchase^[1].

Offuscation consists, for companies, in making this research more difficult, in increasing its costs in order to increase their profit. Let's detail two common practices. The first is to ensure that the same mattress sold in different stores does not appear as such to the buyer. For example, from one distributor to another, the same Simmons mattress will be called Beautyreste Recharge Allie, Recharge Signature Select Hartfield or Beautyreste Recharge Lyric Luxury.

The mattress offered from one distributor to another can also be made slightly different by a secondary characteristic such as a variation in the design of the padding or the exhalation of a chamomile scent. Such subterfuges make it more difficult to compare prices from one brand to another in order to compete, and therefore to obtain your favorite mattress at the cheapest price.

A second practice consists in extending the list of technical characteristics of mattresses and increasing the number of models offered. The search costs then increase considerably, because the consumer, before finding the variety he prefers, must both become familiar with the different characteristics of the mattresses and find out which ones are important to him. If he does not want to exhaust himself with the task, he will choose a sign or a shop and stick to it to buy his mattress. With a strong chance of succumbing to the song of the salesman advising him of a higher-end and more expensive model of mattress than the one he had in mind when he pushed the door of the store. Isn't it about the quality of his sleep for the next ten years, of which he will spend a third lying down?

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Some advice

To conclude, some advice arising from the above or that I have gleaned here or there for the purchase of a mattress:

Here, it only remains for me to wish you good night.

François Lévêque has just published with Odile Jacob Hyperpowerful companies – Giants and Titans, the end of the global model?

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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