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Comment by arkadiyt | Hacker News Reader

This article about Casper purchasing mattress review sites was making the rounds recently as well. Great read:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

LOL! I know Casper well from the skip button on my podcast player, and could hardly care less about mattresses. This bubble is getting pretty big.

Podcast advertisers: Experts in cutting out the middleman since 2013.

My sense is that they're scammers and bottom-feeders, like the people who advertise on daytime television and XM radio. They have very little of value to offer, but are masters at skimming pennies off of their scams.

Is the implication here that after buying a mattress from Casper you don’t actually get a mattress? I’ve never tried to buy one, and I didn’t realize it was a scam.

Casper is a legitimate company.

They probably sell actual mattresses, though I haven't tried to buy one either. They're just review-buying slime: https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15488618

I love my Casper Mattress, I think longingly of it when I'm on the road for work... but this gives me pause.. just a little.

I too love my Casper © mattress, by far the world's best-ever mattress, made from ethical mattress materials and guaranteed to provide you with a sumptuous sleep, night after night!

Here, fellow sleepers, join our club of nocturnal nobles at https://casper.com! Be sure to use my referral code "REAL_HNer" when you place your order. With Casper © you pay for quality—but once you lay down for the first time, you'll realize it's so, so worth it!™

Nice, just bought 100k!

Hope you're coming to the local meetup this weekend. Btw, were you lucky enough to get tickets for the yearly Casper retreat?

People also love their Leesa mattresses and their Tuft & Needle mattresses and their Purple mattresses and their Ghostbed mattresses, and so on.

Online memory foam mattresses have become a bit of a commodity and the biggest distinguishing factor between them appears to be the marketing (and legal) budget.

I probably would have looked at one of those, had I bought in 2017, not 2015.

It's a great space. It costs about 100 bucks to make one and they sell it for 1k.

I didn't check the others but Casper and Leeza are twice the cost as a Tuft and Needle now. It's interesting to see how much they're raising prices with so many competitors and little to no differentiation. It must mean if you walk into a mattress store, you're paying well over the $1k.

As somebody having moved to the US a month ago : some of your industries like mattress sound a lot like gigantic scams.

I did not want to pay 2k$ for a good mattress because it is just a stupid rectangle of foam. Each time I read about how they have nasa engineers in their teams to help them innovate on 'mattress technology' I choke up a little. How can somebody write that with a straight face ?

I ended up buying one on amazon (a Zinus if anybody is interested, heard about it in another HN thread)

Memory foam was developed by NASA’s Ames Research Facilty in the 60s[1]. Great for marketing but not worth it IMHO. Not all mattresses are boxes of foam. Box spring mattresses are not like the foams ones you order online that expand when opened.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_foam

As a natural born American, some of our industries confuse the hell out of me. Why are used car dealerships so scummy? Why are there (overpriced) mattress stores on every corner? Why do we sell prescription drugs on TV?

Mattresses truly are a weird one though. You can see how overpriced they are by the mere existence of these massive stores with allegedly-valuable inventory, that are always empty, because people don't need new mattresses that often!

Of course, they're ridiculously overpriced so you can get great "deals" on them as they're always running tax-free sales, etc.

Thankfully when my wife and I went to try out mattresses for our fancy new big wood bedframe, in the process of trying everything from $600 up to $3000+ (california king size pricing), she declared the cheapest one her favorite, and that was that!

Used car dealerships are scummy because 1) the quality of the product is much better known to the seller than to the buyer, and 2) people make few enough purchases that repeat clientele is not that valuable.

Mattresses have a crazy high profit margin (something like 60-80%) and salespeople in mattress stores work on commission-only fee structures.

Basically, mattress stores are cheap to open and print money. This is also why there are so many nail salons

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15489344

Zinus' claim to fame: replace your mattress at least once more for the same total price. Based on the anecdata I was terrified it would attack me! (Verdict: a bit more firm that I prefer, but still an improvement on ancient of days.)

https://amzn.com/dp/B00Q7EPSHI - $261.28 for me

My Zinus mattress actually did attack me, but it is the best thing I've ever slept on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15490495

haha, funny I was a bit hesitant as well.

In practice I just opened it directly in the bedroom and it inflated in a couple of minutes.

I guess that if the wrapping bag is punctured during transport it must expand in the box and in that case put a lot on pressure on it.

Luckily it did not happen for me.

Your Casper matrress that they paid a Chinese outsourcing company to make and paid less then $100 for one mattress. While you paid $500 or more for it. Yet you could have gone to AliExpress and bought the same none branded mattress for $100.

Also and hmmm does a hacker newser really love their Casper or do they work for them? Casper obviously trolls the Internet for the better of themselves!

That may very well be true, in 2015 however there seemed to be a lot fewer options - I actually found out about casper on HN.

I see one mattress on AliExpress unless you're looking for a very thin European? mattress or pad. $300+ for a Queen.

Here's are two below the cheapest single bed seen on Casper that runs you $500.

A Foam Queen Mattress for $189 https://goo.gl/YLChia

King or Queen $440 and below https://goo.gl/KNGwQG

"Yet you could have gone to AliExpress and bought the same none branded mattress for $100."

You proved the statement to be false. Not to mention, what you have posted are coil mattresses. Companies like Casper and Tuft mark-up quite a bit if AliExpress is "warehouse" pricing, but it's really not outrageous.

I don't love my Casper mattress. I didn't love my Tuft&Needle mattress either.

My Casper mattress started out relatively firm but over the course of a year or so became pretty mushy. It significantly impacted my sleep (without me realizing it) during a period of my life where I really would have benefited from quality sleep.

I'm replacing it with a mattress from an old-school company as soon as I can. I've been sleeping on the floor in the meantime.

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