Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The war to sell you a mattress

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 235 posts

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#151

Post by xapata »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #129
mi100hael wrote: post #107

I've found Ikea to be a great place to buy a mattress. No shady sales tactics or aggressive salesmen, several models you can physically try out in the store, and good quality/value.

I went in there a couple of years ago, and bought a full-sized Sultan Havberg after trying a few out (it looks like they don't sell this anymore, but you can find it in their product catalog - http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/pdf/buying_guides_fy15/Mattress... ) At the time it felt fine, but when it arrived I found it nearly impossible to sleep on. I could feel the springs pressing into me as I inevitably rolled around o…

Next time ask the IKEA staff which one they buy. I forgot the name, but I bought one after a clerk in that department said, "We all own this one." It's amazing. Sometimes I wake up in the morning marveling at how comfortable I was.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#152

Post by woolvalley »

amelius wrote: post #127
mi100hael wrote: post #107

I've found Ikea to be a great place to buy a mattress. No shady sales tactics or aggressive salesmen, several models you can physically try out in the store, and good quality/value.

Except for tall people.

Doesn't Ikea sell the standard mattress sizes? Do you mean a lack double & single tall mattress sizes?

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#153

Post by wmil »

r00fus wrote: post #55
Animats wrote: post #17

The whole mattress industry is a scam. Actual manufacturing cost is $75-$300. Mattresses are even cheaper on Alibaba. Vacuum-packing memory foam shrinks mattresses for shipping, and now they can be imported easily. If you really want to annoy the US mattress industry, set up a review site and review sub-$100 mattresses off Alibaba. (Personally, I have an air bed which cost about $200.)

Personally I question visco-elastic foam. Sure, it's cheap and may be ok for a lot of people, but I personally sleep better on an standard spring bed. Foam mattresses don't breathe, they stink (some mattress I've seen are 1+ yr old and continue to stink) and aren't firm enough for me. Do any online retailers sell standard beds? Or am I a dinosaur?

Standard bed / boxsprings need specialized delivery. So the local display room & warehouse model works better.

The online mattress companies are all built around compressing and using UPS to ship.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#154

Post by zipwitch »

mwexler wrote: post #82

The business models for pricing aggregators and reviews sites are completely absent. Even Consumer Reports struggles to meet the costs of testing and staffing. The BBB is a mess. The "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" hasn't meant anything for decades. It's a sad state of affairs: We all want unbiased reviews, but we won't pay for them. We all want to know the spread of prices so we can balance service/trust with c…

It's somewhat of a recursive lemon problem. We (potential review purchasers) have no way to assure ourselves that we'd be paying for quality reviews and not some sort of fakes, in no small part because of the profusion of ever more convincing fake everything on the internet.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#155

Post by Terretta »

zipwitch wrote: post #154
mwexler wrote: post #82

The business models for pricing aggregators and reviews sites are completely absent. Even Consumer Reports struggles to meet the costs of testing and staffing. The BBB is a mess. The "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" hasn't meant anything for decades. It's a sad state of affairs: We all want unbiased reviews, but we won't pay for them. We all want to know the spread of prices so we can balance service/trust with c…

It's somewhat of a recursive lemon problem. We (potential review purchasers) have no way to assure ourselves that we'd be paying for quality reviews and not some sort of fakes, in no small part because of the profusion of ever more convincing fake everything on the internet.

It’s a mess...

Quoting from link below:

GrubHub / Seamless owns MenuPages, Allmenus, Restaurants on the Run, DiningIn, and Delivered Dish.

Seamless takes a percentage, not a flat fee, of the total food and beverage amount, even though its involvement is the same whether an order is for $10 or $250. Restaurants can choose from four commission levels (12.5%, 15%, 17.5%, and 20%); the more a restaurant pays, the higher up it will appear in the search results. When you search for restaurants on Seamless, you may have noticed that, in the default view, the results appear to be random, but they’re actually arranged by who paid what.

And unlike with, say, Google search results, there’s no disclaimer.

http://tribecacitizen.com/2016/03/01/why-restaurants-hate-gr...

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#156

Post by madcaptenor »

skewart wrote: post #149
hutzlibu wrote: post #36

Now this made me thinking of other online review sites. Are they all like that? I couldn't give an honest review, if I get more money from B than A. So if they state otherwise, I call it fraud And I know that's what people call marketing in general and there might be some truth in it - but that's why you go to these review site to get a neutral view. So normally the customer should pay the reviewer, he is doing work…

Yes. Any online review should be taken with a huge grain of salt. The vast majority are influenced by affiliate payments. Some, like credit cards and other financial products, are especially bad since the payments per conversion (i.e. person who looks at the review site and then signs up for the credit card) can be massive. But even seemingly innocent niche markets, like light-weight backpacking equipment, can be ful…

And they certainly won't tell you "don't buy any of these things". I recently came across BabyGearLab (http://babygearlab.com), which has nice reviews of, say, different car seats or different strollers, and will tell you which one is the best if money is no object, which one is the best if you're on a limited budget, etc. But what I really want is the web site that will tell me "you don't need a smart sock". Yes, that's a thing.

Of course I can just not buy a smart sock. But I pretty much know that at some point I'm going to buy some thing that's almost as useless because it's for the baby.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#157

Post by graeme »

scott_karana wrote: post #125
graeme wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s blackmail. Making a legal threat and making a legal money request combine into an illegal act.

What's the legal threat, if his estimates of the BOM are truthful?

That's it. You can legally threaten to tell the truth, and you can legally ask for money. But combining those two acts is what's illegal.

Note that I may be wrong about this case being blackmail, since the youtube videos are already posted (thanks to gamblor956 for pointing this out). Whereas "Pay me money or I will make a bad youtube video about you" would be blackmail.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#158

Post by upofadown »

Animats wrote: post #17

The whole mattress industry is a scam. Actual manufacturing cost is $75-$300. Mattresses are even cheaper on Alibaba. Vacuum-packing memory foam shrinks mattresses for shipping, and now they can be imported easily. If you really want to annoy the US mattress industry, set up a review site and review sub-$100 mattresses off Alibaba. (Personally, I have an air bed which cost about $200.)

What's with all this talk about fancy imported mattresses from China? You can often just get a local foam wholesaler to cut you off a chunk of foam. Stick on a mattress protector if you really want to put on the Ritz.

I have a chunk of 2 pound, 4" polyurethane that I have been sleeping on for something like 20 years...

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#159

Post by osrec »

Terretta wrote: post #155
zipwitch wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's somewhat of a recursive lemon problem. We (potential review purchasers) have no way to assure ourselves that we'd be paying for quality reviews and not some sort of fakes, in no small part because of the profusion of ever more convincing fake everything on the internet.

It’s a mess... Quoting from link below: GrubHub / Seamless owns MenuPages, Allmenus, Restaurants on the Run, DiningIn, and Delivered Dish. Seamless takes a percentage, not a flat fee, of the total food and beverage amount, even though its involvement is the same whether an order is for $10 or $250. Restaurants can choose from four commission levels (12.5%, 15%, 17.5%, and 20%); the more a restaurant pays, the higher…

This percentage fee paradigm is no different to much of the finance industry. Clearly a farce, but it still surprises me how many people are happy to go along with it.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#160

Post by klank »

skewart wrote: post #145
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem goes deep. I recently decided to get a Consumer Reports subscription after not having one for 10 years. I used it to find the absolute BEST dishwasher. But because their rating system is a little strange, and they don't exactly tell you BUY THIS, DONT BUY THAT, I ended up with a Dishwasher I hate. It was the most expensive, and best according to CR, but I cannot express how miserable this piece of junk ma…

> they don't exactly tell you BUY THIS, DONT BUY THAT > but for what I care about it sucks, its hard to use, and it doesn't dry dishes AT ALL. I'm confused, it sounds like you wish CR had just told you which dishwasher to buy without going into more detail, but you also wish they had gone into more detail about specific strengths and weaknesses so you could make a decision based on what's most important to you. Did C…

Not to mention the fact that "is better than" is almost certainly not transitive for anything beyond the most simplistic definition of "better".
Post reply on HN