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What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it

fivethirtyeight.com

241–250 of 320 posts

Re: What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because its really hard to objectively rate a mattress. IKEA sells them at a fair price and they are great, but people in their minds see them as shit because they are cheap so they can't possibly be as good as the $2000 one.

If they were truly as good, word would spread (word-of-mouth) and the market would re-align. Blog posts would be written about how we're all naive for spending $2,000 instead of $150.

Doesn't work for diamonds. Same things written about diamonds as mattresses and people still buy diamonds.

Re: What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might suspect your source is financially wealthy, and morally bankrupt - if I could follow 1/2 of what you said. But I was definitely entertained. Upvote.

Your average poor person will get in a fist fight over $100, and potentially shoot someone over $1000. They shoot people for nothing anyway. Give your average middle-class citizen $10M to cheat on their wife, and they will. Sometimes they pay $100 to do it anyway. Maybe you won't, but I'll show you how it scales up. And, I'm not saying that in any way these businessmen are immoral, I'll touch on morality at the end,…

Based Terry Davis

Re: What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you get an infestation, it’s best to just burn everything in the room and then fumigate.

There’s no way to get rid of an infestation? I’ve never had one so I seriously don’t know.

Hint: places that reach over 50C inside during the summer don't have bed bugs.

Re: What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t read the article but I’ve worked for one of these companies that was a startup and have a local mattress company as a client. So a little perspective. These companies are all marketing companies. There is no “science” they literally get rolls of foam from foam makers, throw them on in layers and try to find the right combo. I was there, I’ve done it myself. The companies that end up winning have fantastic ma…

How should people buy mattresses, or mattress-like products, to avoid this 2000% markup?

Avoid advertised products?

I'd recommend latex foam. Material is more expensive so there's less wiggle space to apply huge markups.

Re: What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might suspect your source is financially wealthy, and morally bankrupt - if I could follow 1/2 of what you said. But I was definitely entertained. Upvote.

Your average poor person will get in a fist fight over $100, and potentially shoot someone over $1000. They shoot people for nothing anyway. Give your average middle-class citizen $10M to cheat on their wife, and they will. Sometimes they pay $100 to do it anyway. Maybe you won't, but I'll show you how it scales up. And, I'm not saying that in any way these businessmen are immoral, I'll touch on morality at the end,…

That’s quite the fantasy you’ve costructed for yourself.

In it Europe hasn’t invented anything.

Quality of life is just a sham invented by politicians to keep the plebs from demanding... quality of life?

And since you mentioned a 747 as an example of Americas greatness. Well the 747 is but we have been witnessing the real life consequnces of the ‘greed-is-good’ approach to business on a once-great engineering company.

Re: What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it

#246
In some countries, you get the mattress inside an airtight/watertight packaging, and you only get a refund if you return it (yourself or for some shipping cost) while still in that packaging.

This means you can only get a feel for the softness/hardness but not breathability (due to the packaging). On the other hand, it means prices are sane.

Personally, I prefer this system to the US one, where the ethical purchasers subsidize the unethical purchasers and unethical, greedy sellers. YMMV.

Re: What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no way to get rid of an infestation? I’ve never had one so I seriously don’t know.

Hint: places that reach over 50C inside during the summer don't have bed bugs.

Even Phoenix rarely hits 50C and you'd have to be crazy, or have a broken AC system, to let the inside of your house get that hot. So that leaves, what? Desert countries where AC isn't widely used?

Re: What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might suspect your source is financially wealthy, and morally bankrupt - if I could follow 1/2 of what you said. But I was definitely entertained. Upvote.

Your average poor person will get in a fist fight over $100, and potentially shoot someone over $1000. They shoot people for nothing anyway. Give your average middle-class citizen $10M to cheat on their wife, and they will. Sometimes they pay $100 to do it anyway. Maybe you won't, but I'll show you how it scales up. And, I'm not saying that in any way these businessmen are immoral, I'll touch on morality at the end,…

Every industry thinks they are the ones who run the world. Plumbers are reasonably sure the world turns to shit without them, but I'm not sure you use a toilet.

This rant is more sad than entertaining, though I was on-board at the start of the comment. Plug back into reality, even just a little bit.

Re: What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it

#249
post #30

I'd thought I'd get around the madness of mattress shopping by using just the technique mentioned in the article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22377160 At least, until I found something I liked. I purchased a Purple 3, thinking that if I loved it, I'd just stick with it. I did love it, but I couldn't justify spending $2k on a twin(!). I returned it, and purchased from another company for ~$700. I didn't…

I mean, you're complaining about high margins on mattresses, yet you were able to return two mattresses. Hell, you didn't even return the $2000 mattress because you disliked it, you just decided "nvm lol".

Is it not obvious that part of the high margin that you scoff at goes towards covering your (and everyone else's) ability to return one of the most unwieldy household items on a whim?

Your post makes me wish I could take $500 off my purchase price by checking a "waive ability to refund" box on the checkout page instead of paying extra to subsidize this sort of consumer behavior. ;)

Re: What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your average poor person will get in a fist fight over $100, and potentially shoot someone over $1000. They shoot people for nothing anyway. Give your average middle-class citizen $10M to cheat on their wife, and they will. Sometimes they pay $100 to do it anyway. Maybe you won't, but I'll show you how it scales up. And, I'm not saying that in any way these businessmen are immoral, I'll touch on morality at the end,…

That’s quite the fantasy you’ve costructed for yourself. In it Europe hasn’t invented anything. Quality of life is just a sham invented by politicians to keep the plebs from demanding... quality of life? And since you mentioned a 747 as an example of Americas greatness. Well the 747 is but we have been witnessing the real life consequnces of the ‘greed-is-good’ approach to business on a once-great engineering company…

This is kind of what I touch on at the end, with the getting the kids into business, there is a moral concern there. The first executives are intelligent, and caring. They're the engineers. Once you have MBAs flooding in, which HR doesn't know how else to hire people, it just becomes horrible. Feynmann famously ripped NASA a new one after asking the engineers "What's the probability of the Shuttle exploding?". They say: 1/100, 2/100. He asked the executives at NASA, they say 1/100000, 1/1000000. How, how is that even possible? You need the executives to be the engineer, or they fuck everything up. An engineer warned them about the o-ring, the executives ignored it because they were stupid. Same with the max:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/former-boeing-manager-s...

Notably: "For the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane," Ed Pierson wrote to a company executive before the first tragedy.

This would never happen if the executives were engineers. Every time we, humanity, eventually gets stuck in a rut. The Romans invent the most unbelievably complex and well structured government of their time, while the gauls hunt like animals, and they conquer the world, they develop all of the technology (Well, the greeks were even better with their near idealistic Athens, but like the PhDs it never gets implemented or spreads). So the Romans do this, they win. Then...., nothing happens. It goes to shit. The Patricians murder the Plebians who protest, they become corrupt, the people have less and less control, it becomes awful. Then, dictatorship. Then, emperor. Who were the people who drafted the first setup of the roman government? They're 600 years dead, and those who replaced them made it shit. Took 1000 years to recover. The founding fathers. Compare George Washington, and his morality, to our modern politicians. No one had any reason to do anything other than create the perfect government, everyone helped, it was collaborative. Now they're cutthroat. It always goes to shit. Corporations are the new target. The founding fathers tried so hard to put every single failsafe they could, because they knew. They knew they knew. They knew those who would come after them would make it shit. While the founding fathers intentionally put failsafes - the entire article is a big ass fail safe you just read it (It just says exactly what the restrictions are - if people acted just like the founded fathers did they would never need restrictions in the first place), our modern politicians research every possible exploit to the system as if they're in infosec. Gerrymandering, oops! Jefferson forgot about that one, it took 300 years to discover the buffer overflow, but if it's discovered it's abused. Every metric becomes a target. The target of "leading the revolution" gave people who were intelligent and passionate about saving their country. The target of "becoming a politician" in 2020 is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Stone I highly suggest you read just the paragraph about high school. It shows what you need to be, what the selection criterion is. The only selection criterion that works is: Coming up with something new, a new business, a new idea, a new government. After that, they hunt. They get their MBAs to overthrow you with credentials so that they can squeeze themselves in, even though they didn't found Boeing. The patricians bribe who they had to to squeeze even, even though they never came up with the original government. The politicians cheat what they must to squeeze into what the founding fathers tried to prevent. Someone has their eyes on the prize.

Mind you, the French are just as intelligent as the Italians, they're nearly identical at birth, only culture separates them. A french man who grew up in italy is an italian man. It's the system that is what separated the gauls from the romans, and it's survival of the fittest, you're the first to have an opposable thumb then you win. Whoever figures out how to create a self propagating government wins, a couple people did, got a few thousand followers, and it propagated. Business is the new self propagating system, until stability is reached. Only the new people have what it takes. It's not really too genetic either, it is in some way have 4 kids one of them will work, what of the other three? Kahn couldn't stop it, Alexander the great couldn't stop it, Romans worked for 300 years because of adoption, but it was still bleeding. Go through the history. Each half century involved more failures by the plebians and more success from the corrupt patricians, it was slow but sped up, more and more restrictions were put on the people by the incumbents. You always need fresh people. Carnegie? Vanderbilt? Compare to the modern CEO of BP...., of Boeing, stability kills. In hackernews, for people in IT, no one knows shitty bosses and executives more than they do.

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