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Comment by Fluxx | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if you can count this as a startup, but I bought my King-sized Sleep Innovations (memory foam) mattress with Amazon Prime for $530. And if I wanted the less-think 10" one, it would be $400.

http://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Innovations-12-inch-Memory-Mattr...

The damn thing was ~100lbs in a giant box, and I got it shipped to me free. It's super comfortable and well worth the money - remember you sleep for like 25% of your life.

Mattresses seem like less of a specialty-item than eye glasses, so I wonder if big online retailers like Amazon can just cut out the middle man and service 80-90% of customers?

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The problem is that many people like to lie on a mattress before they buy it. Sure, that's a little silly since lying on it for a minute or so is unlikely to capture the experience of tossing and turning on it for a night, but it's clear that it's a competitive advantage to let the consumer compare a few models in a physically direct way.

Warby Parker can get away with the similar consumer requirement for glasses because glasses are small, light and easy to ship. They can send you half a dozen samples and let you pick the one you want. Not so easy with mattresses!

The car market has this problem as well (in addition to others, like the protectionist rackets that the dealerships have set up).

I used to think the same thing about shoes, but Zappos has managed to crack that with their super-easy returns and two-way shipping.

Is two-way shipping with easy returns possible for mattresses? I would be willing to try it if I never had to deal with a mattress salesman again.

With a memory foam mattress, they tend to be vacuum packed in a plastic sleeve and box that is nigh-impossible to ever fit it back in again. I suppose if you had a specialized team that could come to your home, repackage it, and take it away, it might work, but that doesn't sound like it would scale very well outside of a large city.

When I purchased a big screen TV from Amazon, it was hand delivered and setup by a team of two for free, at a competitive price for that model.

I won't claim to be an expert on TVs or their delivery, but that was nicer than buying it at Fry's and manhandling it up the stairs myself.

This was in San Jose area, but I think it was provided anywhere.

Anyway... What I'm trying to say is that a mattress pickup service isn't necessarily out of the question.

My wife and I almost got a Sleep Innovations mattress, but in the end we felt that we couldn't buy a mattress that we hadn't had a chance to try out. We both like a very firm mattress, which can be difficult to find.

While it's true that lying on a mattress for a few minutes won't tell you whether it's the best one or not, it sure did help us rule out many mattresses. We ended up getting an Ikea mattress, which turned out to be quite nice.

Ikea also seems to be the only place in the UK that sells decent slatted frames to put under your mattress. I guess British people aren't familiar with the concept.

Ah yes, we previously had a box spring but opted for the slatted frame. I like it a lot, and I like having the bed lower to the ground (although the best my back ever was when I slept on tatami for a semester in Japan)

> The problem is that many people like to lie on a mattress before they buy it.

One can get all of the benefit of this by selling a single mattress, but also sending 3 or 4 foam mattress toppers to choose from. Correctly designed packaging would let the customer re-roll the topper, then use a vacuum pump to collapse the rolled topper back into a compact form for return mailing. (The pumps would be cheap and disposable, so wouldn't be returned.)

Using a system like this, one could become the Zappos of mattresses. There would still be a restocking and return fee for the mattress, but one could let the customers exchange and try toppers to their heart's content, so long as they took good care of the merchandise.

I bought one from Costco, and didn't like it. They gave me a refund, and the choice to either donate it to charity or have them come pick it up and take it to the dump.

I got my last mattress from Silver State Industries (nevada prison manufacturing) for under $500 (Cal King). It is more comfortable than the Serta that I had originally spent around $1,500 on.

I think I'd find the guilt of knowing my mattress was made by slave labor to be a heavier price than the $1k in savings.

You might want to actually know what you are talking about before commenting. Inmates earn an hourly wage (not great), training on how to do the work, etc. The money they earn gets split up in a few different ways such as going to restitution if applicable and some is available for the inmates to spend at the canteen or save for when they get out.

In Nevada they earn 13 cents an hour.

http://prisonlaw.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/prison-labor-and-t...

That's slave labor.

Care to provide the source for the $0.13/hr? Inmates are paid as little as $1/hr and as much as minimum wage with the lowest hourly rate going to the inmate firefighters due to how the budget is set by the forestry service. The last time I saw the $0.13/hr number trotted out it was also skewed by jobs that paid per piece and not per hour. Inmates that have to pay restitution pay about 5% of their wages, and each working inmate pays deductions for room and board as dictated by the state legislature. I've also seen those with an agenda perform hourly wage calculations on the inmate pay _after_ deductions. If you've got a reputable source that can show otherwise I'd love to see it. I'll also note that I'm related to a recently retired department of corrections officer and have used other prison industries services and am familiar with how it works and what the wages are from dealing with the services and the personell running parts of prison industries in Nevada.

wsj article on prison industries in nevada: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020391180457665...

High Desert Prison with current work being done and wages (most facilities don't list wages): http://www.doc.nv.gov/?q=node/25

A now very outdated paper on the economic impact of SSI on Nevadas economy which includes a small section on wages: http://www.cabnr.unr.edu/uced/Reports/Technical/fy1998_1999/...

Whether a job is "slave labor" has absolutely nothing to do with what the job pays. If you are not forced to do the job, you are not a slave.

Perhaps you'd rather have these exceptional citizens just staying in their bunks not doing anything or even better, back in society?

13 cents PLUS room, board, power, water, garbage, etc

LOL, did you find a rock hammer stuffed inside?

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