I hate mattress buying!

It almost makes me want to start the first honest mattress retailer. There has to be someone other than me who finds the process of mattress buying to be especially painful. It's amazing to me that a simple product could have such a complex sales process.

Here in Seattle, we visited four different mattress dealers (and we could have seen many more, but I'm not sure that I would survive that). Sleep Country USA advertises incessantly on TV, has a lot of stores, and specializes in selling mattresses (and the accompaniments).

My local Sleep Country is staffed by a presentable, polite young man who reminds me of Kenneth on 30 Rock, but with Hillary Clinton's ambition and Donald Trump's salesmanship. Yes, I was very afraid. No, it was not reasonable. He was actually quite patient as I tried many, many mattresses. Karen wouldn't lie on them for fear of catching bedbugs, cooties, ebola, or some other malady. Most were nice. I didn't like the Tempurpedic beds though. "Kenneth" advised me to lie on one for about a minute and then try to get up. That experience is like being trapped in a shallow grave. Neither Karen or I liked it, so the Tempurpedic was out. Neither of us liked the Sleep Comfort air thing either. No futons -- we don't really find them very restful in Japanese hotels when they have them. And I lived with a waterbed from the time I was 15 to 30 or so, and that was enough of that.

Which left me with regular old mattresses. Every store has the same brands, but the actual model names have been changed to "protect the innocent" and confuse the consumer. What's a Bramblewood at one place is a Birchglade at another, though those could be different mattresses -- it's impossible to tell. If you listen to the sales people, they'll lecture you on coil gauge, number of coils, and layers of various fibers, while showing you mattress cutaway models that don't really help you make a decision. They all come with warranties, but it seems like it's almost impossible to collect on one (it's like trying to collect on a warranty on a car battery or set of tires). Almost everything that could go wrong is excluded from coverage. And if you sweat or lie down too much or turn over too often, or flip your mattress too much/not often enough, that kills your warranty too. So, my conclusion is that this is a damn expensive disposable product. You sleep on it until you find yourself or your spouse rolling downhill involuntarily and then have them take it away for scrap.

But it's not just a mattress. There's the box spring, which doesn't appear spring at all and looks like a rectangular wooden box with the thinnest cheapest fabric stretched around the top and bottom. They now have low-profile ones since American mattresses keep growing in depth so that jumping into bed requires some pole vaulting experience. We probably should have opted for low-profile boxsprings, but I didn't remember that when I was placing my order. And I'm sure they're extra since everything is.

And then there's the frame. Let me take a moment out to talk about our trip to Ikea. We looked at their beds. They have one that matches our cheap utilitarian dressers and it's cheap and utilitarian too. But I think it's too small. Ikea itself says US King mattresses are 76 x 80. But this bed lists its dimensions as 76 x 79.5. I knew that was a recipe for disaster when I tried to match that up with my Simmons Beautyrest, so I abandoned that plan. Yes, I did look at the Ikea mattresses. Most of them are very cheap. They're also uncomforably stiff or uncomfortably saggy. They do have one fancy one for $1200+. It also seems uncomfortable. Perhaps if you're a narcoleptic, an Ikea mattress would work, but not for me.

So, we need a metal frame for our bed (no, I'm not going to a furniture store and buy a real furniture bed). I won't even shell out for pillow shams (maybe it's the word "sham" that gets me). So I just want a frame. Of course, there's the free one that comes with the bed and sucks according to the salesperson and another one that's infinitely better and costs more. OK, OK. I'm not a light person, so I'll buy the one that definitely won't collapse under me instead of the one that almost certainly won't collapse under me.

Then, they start trying to sell me other stuff. Undercoating, rust-proofing... wait that's car salesman. No, it was some sort of mattress sealant to keep my sweat from dripping through the sheets, staining my mattress, and invalidating the warranty that I'll never be able to collect on anyway. I passed on that one (one small victory for me).

Sleep County, Sears, and Macy's all had nice beds. Some were expensive. Some were really expensive. Some were crazily expensive. We opted for the basic expensive model. There was one cheaper model at Sears, but it was the Sears-o-pedic, and that brand name made me laugh uncontrollably -- it would have been better if they'd named it the ACME Sears-o-pedic, so I could think I was buying a bed that Wile E. Coyote would have approved of. And even the cheapest Sears model wasn't that cheap. And I've had my Sears experiences, so I went with Sleep Country.

Why not Macy's? They were friendly, but they actually retag the basic Simmons Beautyrest Classic line as "Vanderbilt" or some such nonsense. The net result, is I felt worse buying a less expensive mattress there than I did at Sleep Country.

Theoretically, our mattress arrives tomorrow. Light a candle for me.