Yesterday, to celebrate our nation’s freedom, I drove with the fam to Sears to pick up a new bed. The one I’ve been sleeping on is the first one Denisa and I got when we were married. (Well, technically the first one we got was the air mattress that we used for a few weeks until our bed arrived. Our first apartment smelled strongly of cat urine–especially the closer you got to the carpet. Sleeping on an air mattress for two weeks in that apartment? Not the best experience I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve come a long way . . . )
Anyway. I’ve decided that mattress makers go to extremely great lengths to make sure the consumer is as confused as possible before he or she makes an actual purchase. There was Sealy, Serta, Memoryfoam, Sears-o-Pedic–and some other brands I’ve already blocked from my memory. And while all of them had similar features, they all called them something different. This would be like a car manufacturer deciding to call their tires “firbles”, their engines “bagdoodles”, and their air conditioning “tiddledings.” (“It’s got a brand new set of firbles, and the tiddledings work great, even when the bagdoodle is churning away.”) Maybe if you have a PhD in bedding, you might have a chance of telling them all apart, but if you don’t, fuhgeddaboutit.
Then there’s pillow tops, memory foam, firm, plush, ultra plush, ultra firm plush, double plus bad firm. (I like firm beds and I cannot lie. You other brothers can’t deny . . .) It’s enough to make a guy go cross eyed.
And then there’s pricing. Sears was running a sale yesterday. But the list price for the mattresses was like $2500, and then there was 50% off, and another $200 off for kicks, and another 10% off because why not . . . They’re practically giving them away, right? Except it still cost us $800 for what we picked out. (The Franchesca TI2 firm, in case you were wondering.) And we got the set, not just the mattress, because I was assured that if I just bought the mattress, demons would come and ruin in overnight. The box spring apparently keeps the demons at bay. Go figure.
But hey–at least I don’t have to do this for another decade or so, right? By then, maybe they’ll have figured out the demon problem. Science can do some amazing things these days, you know.
Oh. I also had a BBQ. But something tells me buying a mattress was much more in line with what our founding fathers intended us to do on Independence Day.
Every year the weight of your mattress increases by 1 lb. It is skin, dirt, hair, etc. that the mattress absorbs. Fun stuff!
That’s such a disgustingly fun piece of trivia. Thanks for sharing! 🙂
In honor of Independence Day, I cataloged a book about Joseph Stalin. In Russian, no less.