Buying a Mattress
Why does buying a house, car, or pet dragon seem easier than buying a mattress?
I had grown quite attached to our current one over the past several [many] years. Yet, it was letting me down recently with less than 8 hours sleep and sore shoulders. Despite the obvious attachment, it was time for a change.
We actually began looking for a replacement over a year ago and just quietly set that project aside. Once it fell off the “to do” list we keep on the kitchen counter, it seemed as if a permanent reprieve had been granted. But then a friend posted on social media that she was on the search for a new matress and, BOOM!, we were back in the hunt ourselves. Verbally expressing the idea of buying a new mattress brought new fervor to the act of acquiring one.
All the experts say that Memorial Day is a wonderful time to buy a mattress. Wonder why that is? How did restful sleep become associated with men and women sacrificing for their country? But true—there were big promises online of Memorial Day Mattress Sales. I suspect those discounts will also be available on Independence Day, Labor Day, and National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day (August 4th if you’re planning to buy me a gift).
We set a date to go to a mattress store to look at our options. In preparation we laid on all the beds in our house and camper. We came away with the realization that the most comfortable mattress we owned was the foam one we made for Wanda the campervan. It was four inches of plain foam and three inches of cooling memory foam resting on a plywood base—firm and yet soft.
I’m sure mattress salesmen are closely related to car salesmen; I recognized many of the same tools of the trade. But the young man who led us through our “self-discovery” of the perfect mattress was good at what he did and pleasurable to be around. In our Goldilocks experiment, we quickly narrowed the field to two mattresses diagonally across the aisle from each other. We went back and forth, with the pillow and without the pillow, on our backs and on our sides, finally agreeing on the one that was just a little less firm than the other. The salesman then countered with ‘but I can deliver the other one tomorrow’. Hey buddy, I’ve waited YEARS for this moment so what’s another few days?
So next we anticipated the delivery of the new mattress. Of course that meant cleaning out from under the old one to remove dust bunnies and perhaps even real bunny parts left by the skilled hunting cat we used to have.
Sweet dreams!