The Squishiest, Sweetest Sleep | Hacker News Reader

The Squishiest, Sweetest Sleep

nytimes.com

70 pointskawera54 comments

I wish there was a good way to try mattresses properly before buying them. Not just lie down on it for a few minutes in a shop, but sleep the whole night on it. Like a bed shop teaming up with a hotel chain to let you choose which bed and/or mattress you want to try for a night. The ones in the article start at US$1995 - I wouldn't want to spend that much money on something so important without trying it, and would consider spending 5-10% of that to try it in a hotel room for a night. I know they say they'll have a "100-night guarantee with a full refund, as Casper does", but it is a huge hassle getting that sort of thing delivered and then returning it.

Tinder could add mattress model and age as an optional field in user profiles.

A lot of hotel chains actually do this. 4 seasons sells Simmons brand mattresses on their website.

https://m.fourseasons.com/magazine/thrive/hotel-beds/

Ritz Carlton, Westin, and other Marriot properties do the same. I believe some are just bedding but several sell the mattresses.

Yup, my wife and I sleep on a Westin Heavenly mattress. I'm sure I paid a premium for it, but we both were comfortable sleeping on it. Purchased in 2004 so probably due for replacement at this point.

All the popular mattress sellers (including this new Afloat, apparently) have a very flexible refund policy. You don't need to lift a finger (except figuratively) to receive or return it.

You don't need to lift a finger, but you do need to recognize that any "returned" mattress is likely going straight to a landfill.

Sometimes, used mattresses can be handy. Such as when you accidentally punch a hole in the bottom of a river, and need a way to plug it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_flood

Wow, thanks for linking that. Super fascinating. I just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-qD6h6wlU0 to learn more about the Chicago flood. Hard to believe!

I'd love to know if this is actually true. Can't these companies clean the mattresses and resell them, or at least donate them? Is destruction the only safe way?

A little more about the return process: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/your-money/buying-a-mattr...

And some anecdata: When I wanted to return an online mattress, I had the option of showing a receipt for giving it to a charity, or having the mattress company pick it up. None of the local charities I looked into took even slightly used mattresses. So the mattress company "pick up" was from a junk disposal company, and they just took the mattress to the waste transfer station on its way to the landfill.

My girlfriend used to work for a reasonably well known mattress company. Apparently returned mattresses there were given to charity for use in homeless shelters and such.

unfortunately its hard to be like "ok i hate this mattress so much I will sleep on the floor until I find something I like better. take it back!"

Simple: Keep your old mattress until you're sure that you want to keep your new one.

Or, buy a new mattress before returning the one you didn't like. This way you only need to store a superfluous mattress for a short period of time.

I feel like these are solveable problems.

I have a not-small apartment and there still isn’t room for an entire extra mattress.

Keep it under the new one

I skate through on laziness. I offloaded my last mattress a couple of years ago, mostly intending to thence get a new one, but never quite got round to it. If we all just embrace our inner slackers, we can put an end to the problems of mattress disposal!

Here in the Czech Republic, and I believe it's similar in most of Europe, several months of no-questions-asked guarantees for mattresses are very common. This is different from warranty (common to be 25 years).

25 year warranties?! In the US, mattress companies run ad campaigns to convince people that mattresses are consumables that last eight to ten years. Funny how that works.

what price though ? here they say it's pricey because it's a 20 year investment.

The US consumers prefer spring mattress while European consumers prefer mattresses made from latex foam. Over time springs degrade faster than foam and so US mattresses have a shorter lifespan.

My $2k latex matress has a giant sink hole in the middle of it.

I'm non-too happy, and a bit disillusioned about the idea that latex matresses last longer.

Do you have data to support that assertion? As a European, I grew up with nothing but box-spring mattresses. IKEA has more box-spring products than foam ones.

I think you might mean spring or pocket-spring. A box spring is something you put a mattress on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-spring

Of course, oops -- pocket spring!

My experience in Italy strongly suggests spring mattresses are the norm.

You can't return a mattress - instead, they're donated to Goodwill and other organizations, and Casper et. al will help arrange the pickup.

Tempur [1] gives 100 days to change your mind and get another mattress. You can do it one time though.

[1] http://tempur.com

An interesting aside not mentioned in the article: an initial patent application for the waterbed was rejected due to prior art by Robert Heinlein. He described a (fictional) waterbed in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

I actually cannot sleep in a soft squishy bed. I almost prefer a hard one, probably because I grew up in them. Once I got a really nice memory foam mattress and it is like sleeping in a cloud, but I found out that I don't like sleeping in cloud.

Yeah the mattress industry is a great example of another industry where cloud is overrated. :)

yeah, the future of the bedroom is containers

Recently migrated all my sleep cycles to bedless infrastructure.

(I know it's not really "bedless", but whatever, at least I'm feeling better rested lately)

I'm partial to bare-metal myself.

I had to stay at my parents' place for a few months where the bed has a soft mattress and I downgraded to the floor after a month because my back started hurting really bad. It took more than two weeks of back excercises and sleeping on the floor to fix that.

Sleeping on the floor can be great for fixing back issues. A good part of the world sleeps on the floor even today (with matting/blankets/etc).

"Sleeping on the floor can be great for fixing back issues."

I can vouch for this. I've recently started sleeping on the floor, and at first my back hurt some, but after a couple of days I got used to it and now it's feeling so much better. I have really poor posture and constantly slouch when I'm sitting in my chair, and so usually have back issues. Sleeping on the floor has worked wonders.

Even when I'm not sleeping on the floor, I prefer firm mattresses, as soft ones are horrible for my back.

Btw the softness can also come from a bad slatted bad base. If you just put the mattress on the floor, or use a hard board as bed base you can hava a similar "hard" experience, while still having a soft surface.

I'm with you. Same for pillows. I can't handle big soft fluffy pillows and soft beds. Especially memory foam. It hurts my back. I've actually gotten up in the middle of the night to sleep on the floor before when the bed's been too soft.

> It hurts my back. I've actually gotten up in the middle of the night to sleep on the floor before when the bed's been too soft.

I have an old memory foam mattress that is getting less and less firm. After waking up with a sore back at 3am 2 nights in a row I flipped it over and slept on the bottom, much firmer side. Has been working perfectly for the past week while I wait for my new mattress.

> Has been working perfectly for the past week while I wait for my new mattress.

Why do you need a new one if the existing one works "perfectly"?

Perhaps I exaggerated. It was noticeably better than the other side. Still could be more comfortable.

How do you sleep? I don’t mind a firm bed. I’m a side sleeping and my arms and legs will hurt in it’s too firm.

The floor would make me numb.

Side or back usually. I dunno I've camped a lot in my life and slept in odd places and always had sort of shitty beds. I think i've just gotten used to it over the years.

I still prefer to have something underneath me. You're right sleeping directly on the floor sucks. I meant more on the floor with a blanket or some foam or something underneath me as opposed to a soft sinking type bed.

In particular, too soft makes my back hurt. (I side sleep; the softer the bed, the more my back is curved from side to side.)

Meh, the water bed's time kind of came and went, IMO. I bought them because they were generally cheap, and I did like sleeping on them. Get a mattress with some baffles in it, and it gets rid of the sloshing. TFA raises the question of sex, and my experience and those reported to me say it doesn't diminish it at a minimum, and greatly enhances it for some. Without baffles, it can be a bit of a rodeo ride, though.

That said, they use electricity (you will not sleep long on an unheated water bed), take a small bit of maintenance, and keep the dogs and cats off it. I'm happy with our memory foam mattress.

How safe are they?

An electrically heated water bed sounds like a recipe for disaster.

In the 35 years since I bought my first one, I’ve never heard of anyone getting electrocuted. That would be quite a feat. First, the vinyl bladder has to leak. The electrical insulation of the heater has to have worn through to bare metal. That’s a trick because the heater lies pressed down by a few hundred kg of water. Finally, the vinyl “tub” the mattress sits in (in case the mattress leaks) has to have leaked, too, in order for water to get to the heater. Even then I think the odds are slim because it’s just a big resistive element. I suppose if both wires some how got exposed. Did I mention the several hundred kgs of water lying on it?

IOW, file it under “Things I Worry About When I am Done Worry About Killer Bee Attack’s”. It ain’t gonna happen.

"The electrical insulation of the heater has to have worn through to bare metal"

I'm less worried about vinyl wearing through than I am about punctures, tears and shoddy manufacturing.

Fun fact: East-coast furniture magnate Bob Kaufman (Bob's Discount Furniture) got his start selling waterbeds in Connecticut after he'd used one to help recover from a motorcycle accident, and branched out into other kinds of furniture as the waterbed faded in popularity.

“It’s like salmon,” he said. “They’ll return to the place where they were spawned.”

Slept in one once. It was very very wierd. With two of you, its a bit more dynamic when one rolls over, than I think I like. I had a metric french tonne of lucid dreams (no, not that kind)

I grew up sleeping in a water bed for a number of years. Pretty nice, though it does take some getting used to. And the phrase talking about it being a microclimate is spot on. Turn the temperature down in the summer, turn it up in the winter.

I generally liked my waterbed while growing up. There was one significant downside though:

If the heater broke, you were in for miserable nights until it was fixed. Sleeping on top of multiple layers of blankets, if you even have that many (try fitting them in a small apt) only partially mitigates it - your bed will suck the heat right out of you.

I will never forget the sensation of being sucked into the wavy vortex that was my parents' mid-80s waterbed.

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