Dangers Lurking for the Mattress Buyer

The modern mattress market is vast. Non-spring and inflatable mattresses, mattresses with independent coil units and coconut (coir) mattresses, waterbeds and those with multi-layer fillings. Without a special guide, you won't make sense of mattress models and descriptions. And every salesperson knows how easy it is to lure a trusting, simple-minded buyer into their retail network.

Everything a seller tells you about a mattress can safely be divided at least in two. If the seller talks a lot and uses technical terms — divide it by four. If they start claiming they are the only one on the planet to have an exclusive mattress — grab your things and run. Only when the seller answers your questions should you inspect and try the mattress yourself, and only after that make a purchase decision based primarily on your own impressions.

Market research and comparative analysis

If you want to compare the price of a mattress you're interested in across different stores, don't do it by relying on the model name. A clear classifier of mattresses (like, for example, for computers or office equipment) still does not exist, so at best you'll get confused, at worst you'll buy something you didn't want — and possibly pay more than necessary. Therefore, for comparative analysis use characteristics rather than names.

Additional features

Quite often many manufacturers, trying to stir up interest in their products, "tune" certain models — equipping them with ventilation valves, edge support, silk covers. Most often the purpose of such "gadgets" is to draw the buyer's attention away either from an exorbitant price or from some structural or functional shortcomings of the mattress itself. Not to mention that these additions themselves significantly increase the mattress's cost.

Trusting the description

Confusion in terminology has always existed and there's no escaping it. Different manufacturers (and even more so sellers) often attach different meanings to terms like "firmness", "resilience", "orthopedic", "anatomic". Therefore, to get the most accurate idea of what exactly is being sold to you, follow the golden rule of mattress buyers: "It's better to lie on it once than to see it a hundred times."

Low price

A seller's standard trick is to advertise cheap models to lure the buyer into the store. When a buyer attracted by an unbelievably low price finds themselves in front of the display, polite salespeople begin to lavish praise on goods that are by no means cheap. In the end, it's not always possible to understand whether mattresses were ever sold at the advertised price. And don't be surprised if you enter a store hoping to buy inflatable beds, but are persistently offered a mattress with independent spring blocks and ten zones of variable firmness.