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Comment by awalton | Hacker News Reader

> It's really hard to know what's a good price for a mattress.

I don't understand this at all. You can Google and have all the prices right at hand, so comparison shopping by number isn't hard.

You can go to a mattress store and lay on a handful of mattresses and figure out pretty quickly what you like - is the pillow top or foam too soft? Do the coils poke too hard? Too firm? Too heavy for you to move when you need to do the sheets? - You admitted to doing this yourself.

I could never see myself buying a mattress from a company like Casper personally. Returning something like a mattress because you don't like it has got to be a level of hassle that I can't even begin to imagine being worth it, vs just making sure you bought one that you're comfortable with in the first place.

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> so comparison shopping by number isn't hard

Yes, it is. The major mattress stores each have their own custom SKUs to defeat comparison.

> You can go to a mattress store and lay on a handful of mattresses and figure out pretty quickly what you like

To some extent, but there's a wear-in period on a new mattress. It takes my body a few days to a few weeks to get used to any new mattress; trying to figure out how that's going to go from a few minutes in a store isn't super effective.

It’s such an infrequent purchase that you don’t have a baseline for what is a good price or not. It’s not like when you’re buying food and you always buy bananas for $1 and you stop to grab a few items at somewhere new & bananas are $2 so you don’t buy them cause you have a baseline.

It’s the same exact thing you seen in automotive sales, how do you tell if something is a good price? Well looking at the car compared to other cars in that area may help but what about one model vs another and so forth.

So go lay on a mattress or test drive a vehicle, all that does is tell you if you absolutely hate the item in question not if you actually like it so you add a wide range of prices on very similar items with unlimited reviews or information on them it’s incredibly overwhelming.

Caspar & others (Tuft & Needle) did a great job with the market by appealing to those concerns. 100 night free trial (T&N) and if you don’t like it, we’ll arrange to pick it up/drop it off at a homeless shelter or similar. Casper did something similar.

Once a decade or half decade larger purchases without a baseline is incredibly stressful for most consumers.

> It’s such an infrequent purchase that you don’t have a baseline for what is a good price or not.

Well, we have Google now.

But if you're willing to buy something of that price range without doing a little bit of research then it's an issue.

I had to buy a mattress recently (because the one I had bought online - for a discount price - sucked). I went to the store and tested the different models.

Though I agree the once a decade thing complicates things.

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