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Get Tough Pep Talk!
If a store has mattresses on display and invites you to look around, you have the privilege of taking your time and looking around. Don't hesitate to linger, test a mattress, or ask questions.
Most mattress stores will have enough sales personnel that one will descend on you pretty quickly. Do be courteous and be willing to take a business card. This can help the sales person relax that you won't forget about him if and when you decide to make a purchase.
Don't be afraid to ask questions. Mattresses are not all that simple and they cost a lot of money. A good sales person will be pleased if you ask questions.
Don't be alarmed if a sales person does not know all of the answers. Only be alarmed if they tell you things you know are wrong or if they won't try to find out what you've asked and they don't know.
Even before you've made any preliminary choices, ask about delivery options and whether or not the company will haul off an old mattress. The sales person is more likely to agree to such things (and be generous) while you're a prospect. Once you're a sale, they can become surprisingly less generous.
If you have friends who have purchased mattresses, ask for recommendations. Word of mouth is powerful.
Don't let the sales person hurry you, either in the show room (unless they're closing or you've been there for hours) or when it comes to making up your mind.
If financing options are important to you, discuss them early in the process and plant the seed in the mind of your sales person that you're interested in getting good terms.
If you have specific interests or requests, ask the sales person. This can help save a lot of time. For instance, if you're interested in only waterbeds or you need to get a product delivered by next week, spelling out your requirements will help the sales person guide your search.
Mattress-Shopper
Toughen Up to Buy a Mattress
How Can You Compare Mattresses?
To some extent, you can't. That's not because there are not very comparable products on the market, it's because that information may be somewhat obscured.
Here is what you need to know. There are only a few major mattress manufacturers. They all make mattresses for at least three price points but more likely four.
They all have a lowest-priced model. They all have a medium-priced model. And they all have a top-quality model. Just about everybody offers those three levels. When a company adds a fourth tier to its product line, it is at the tippy top, a super-deluxe extra special model.
If you can more or less figure out which model you're looking at (for instance, the Sealy medium-priced mattress), you can compare it to other medium-priced mattresses.
If you start to look at store brands (like a department store's exclusive brand), you should find out all you can. Many stores will tell you who makes their mattresses (not all will do that, but ask). They may say, "Oh, our Orpheus mattress is made for us by Sealy." If you can get an idea what level mattress this is, you have a good point of comparison.
Beware of the lingo. Economy, lower-priced, or bargain basement are words no mattress person ever uses.
The bottom rung of the tier is probably called "good." The middle rung is likely to be "superior" and the top is "excellent" and then they'll pull out all of the stops for their top level, if they offer it.
If you're still not sure, ask the sales person if he or she has a better quality mattress but in that same family. If he does, that means there's at least one mattress ranked above the one you're looking at.
By the way, as a general rule, you can usually do better at large mattress warehouses and discounters than at furniture stores or department stores ... but there is no such thing as "always" in mattress shopping. These specialty places can surprise you if they hold major sales (sometimes they'll sell mattresses at a loss as a loss-leader to attract you into the store) or if they are very high volume and pride themselves as being discounters.
Mattress-Shopper
We don't sell mattresses and have no financial interest in any company that does.
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Buying a Mattress is Not For Wimps
Buying a mattress is not for wimps. It makes buying a used car seem like getting Girl Scout cookies. But getting a great deal on a wonderful new mattress is not impossible, either. You just have to toughen up to win this battle.
First of all, it is almost impossible to comparison shop for mattresses. That’s because companies market identical mattresses to different stores under different names and sometimes with different color fabrics.
For instance, let’s say the AAA Mattress company (a world-famous manufacturer) has a mid-range mattress for sale. It may offer this to some chain mattress stores as the “Alexander” model and put it in a blue cover. But if you go to the furniture store down the street, they don’t carry the Alexander model. Instead, they have the “Beatrice” model and it has a white cover. (In truth, they are the exact same mattress—just named and packaged differently.)
You could probably go to some exclusive furniture store and find they don’t carry either the Alexander or the Beatrice, but they offer something “much nicer” in the form of the Caprice model—with a pale yellow cover. And, you guessed it, the Caprice is just the Alexander or Beatrice with a new name.
I do not know of any source that has a master mattress index that can tell you all of the different identities of a single mattress. But as a savvy mattress buyer the first thing to do is realize just because a store doesn’t carry the same model name as other stores doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry the same mattress.
This marketing practice has to do with the fact that many prestigious stores like to carry their own "exclusive" line of mattresses. However, they don't want to do anything as drastic as actually manufacture their own line of mattresses. So they contract with a reputable supplier and, in many cases, just agree to repackage an existing product with a fancy new label.
Now the good news about this practice is that most reputable stores want to sell high-quality, super reliable products. They don't take junk. So these store-branded mattresses are often very good product...you can almost count on that. What you can't be sure is that this "exclusive" mattress isn't available with a different name, cover, and price tag elsewhere.
The more you know about the mattress you want (size, coil count, type of coil, gauge, covering) the better you’ll be able to see through this marketing camouflage. The main thing is to remember that if it seems like mattress A is the same is mattress B but they have different names, they may very well be the same mattress. In other words, don't be overly impressed by names or labels.
In addition to the confusion factor, many mattress sales people will try to create a sense of urgency. Usually, the ploy is that a major sale is going to end (usually by midnight that night). There may also be other tactics used to encourage you to buy right now rather than later. And if you’ve been mattress shopping for a while, at some point, you may just be plain ready to throw in the towel and get something.
The fact is there is almost always a mattress sale going on. You just probably never noticed them when you weren’t mattress shopping.
If you’re not in a huge hurry to get a mattress by a specific day, don’t worry about “missing” any sale. They happen pretty frequently. In fact, you may be wiser to pass on a hurry-buy-today sale to continue shopping than to take advantage of a special price. Even if you come back to buy the original mattress, you can probably catch it on sale again.
Some mattress sales people know tons of stuff about mattresses and are eager to talk coils and inner springs and warranties with anybody who’ll listen. But some mattress sales people are just people killing time, waiting for other jobs, and they could actually know less than you do after reading this website. Don’t assume that anyone working as a mattress sales person is knowledgeable. And don’t assume that because they have answers that they have the right answers. I usually do a little test. Ask them to explain something simple, something that you know. If they give you a wrong answer, you don’t have to be rude or turn away … just be careful about what they tell you.
Mattress sales people should be more than willing to give you time to stretch out and test drive mattresses. The one good thing about buying a mattress is that it can be slow going (if you sprawl out and test six mattresses, you can easily kill an hour in the show room). The snail’s pace will give you some breathing room—your sales person will likely not hover over you and you and your shopping mates will have the opportunity to talk over possible purchases.
Don’t be afraid to take notes. Comparison shopping is really only possible with mattresses if you write down what you’ve seen (and where you’ve seen it) along with prices, warranty information, and your own subjective impressions about firmness and comfort level.