What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by npip99 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

Swenrekcah wrote: post #245

heloocity wrote: post #239

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…

I'm not sure what you mean by "Quality of life is just a sham invented by politicians to keep the plebs from demanding... quality of life?". I don't think politicians invented anything like that? I remain confused.

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

#252

Post by npip99 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 8:50 AM UTC

friendlybus wrote: post #248

heloocity wrote: post #239

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,…

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.

Eh, I don't think so. There's too much interdependence, you can have anxiety over how many things your dependent on, especially in Tech. It's actually terrifying. If Azure closed down tomorrow I'd be fucked so hard, though any business will eventually try to be as independent as they can when they're big enough (Other than Netflix and AWS, I'm sure there's some under the table money making that happen as 50% margins apparently disappear from Netflix's wallet even though Netflix could just run it themselves). Too many companies and systems supply the whole world at a near monopoly, if epackets disappeared everyone would be fucked beyond belief. We all know that there's a lot of people involved, and we all do respect the workers too. Go to any area with businessmen, Grand Central Station or an international airport or something. And look at the section with books that are clearly targeted towards businessmen. At least 1/3rd of the selection is emotional support in response to having to fire people, and the emotional support of handling an economic downturn. People jumped out of buildings because of 1987 all over Downtown Manhattan, it was horrible. They know so many things need to be carefully in balance for them to continue.

You always have to be humble unless you're a billionaire because there's always someone vastly more powerful and rich than you are, by orders of magnitude. Your network's wealth and power as a normal distribution always ends up trailing behind you as you try to meet new people above you, but there's always the right tail end where you know a few people who could spend your net worth in a night because they want to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrl5PFB35Ec

Look at how humble the CEO of the Maverick's has to be as he meets Mark Cuban. It's somewhere in there, I'm not gonna find the time but it's in there.

I don't know if you've ever seen the Black Mirror dystopia about social media and kissing up to people. There's a lot of that. It sucks. That's why most business events involve drinking until tispy, it loosens everything up.

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

#253

Post by ss3000 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 8:56 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #211

scarface74 wrote: post #209

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.

They're tiny. Even the adults are quite small. The babies are specks. The younger ones are clear unless they've recently fed, so nearly invisible when they aren't bright red from ingesting blood. They have a real talent for going unnoticed, even when there are dozens or hundreds of them. People often discover an infestation due to bites or poop smears, not from seeing a live bug at any time. They mostly come out at n…

I can confirm all of the above, having lived through an infestation myself. Had to ditch my dirt cheap apartment and basically throw away all of my belongings at the time out of fear of bringing any of them with me to the next place ("luckily" I didn't have much at the time as I was a poor student). And then ended up spending $2000+ anyways on a full room heat treatment for my new place because I could swear I was still getting new bite marks and it was driving me insane (though in hindsight they might have been what's referred to as "phantom bites" but I wasn't going to take the chance to find out after going through that whole ordeal).

Up to that point I've lived in shady places with ants, roaches and rats and other shitty stuff but none of that bothered me too much, so I thought I could handle any shitty living arrangement as long as the price was right, but the bed bugs thing was by far the most nerve wracking experience of my entire life, and even made me contemplate suicide at one point. I learned to not cheap out on a place to live ever since... And definitely never pick up used furniture lying on the sidewalk, which I used to do a lot...

So yeah... I can see why people might have reservations against used mattresses...

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

#254

Post by ss3000 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 9:03 AM UTC

tartoran wrote: post #214

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Food grade diatomaceous earth is a natural non-toxic method to kill bed bugs and prevent them from invading your home

Sure, that can kill a few of them, but entirely inadequate for actually getting rid of any real infestation. They breed much more quickly than the diatomaceous earth can kill, and can survive on the order of months without any feeding so you can never be sure to have killed them all with a passive approach that just waits for them to come out and kill themselves.

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

#255

Post by Fnoord » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

sjg007 wrote: post #175

ghaff wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was speaking at a company event at the BMW facility in SC. We did some driving on their track. My takeaway was: 1. I do get the attraction of some of these cars. 2. Nope. Not worth it to me even though I could afford them if I wanted to.

Sure but next try out a Porsche.

As the saying goes, Porsche is for people who cannot afford Lamborghini or Ferrari.

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

#256

Post by npip99 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 9:20 AM UTC

Swenrekcah wrote: post #245

heloocity wrote: post #239

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…

I mean, I can be more lenient. Europe had good researchers. They were the Athens, between the Germans ones of the 20-50's, and Turing, there was a lot. The Russians got a lot done too. But again, all research. Nothing profitable. It was never self propagating. Rome was self propagating, they conquered. Athens, only sustained intellectualism until it bled away.

(I'm not counting the mathematicians of the 1700s that did amazing work, I'm referring to modern Europe and the US, 20th century and beyond)

It's kind of sad that a huge market for businessmen is taking an American business, and just doing the same thing in Europe or Latin America. It's, it's sad. There's uh, absolutely no foreign competition in most situations that we have to meet. The ratio is clearly wrong, and we compete with more companies than we can found so Europe should statistically be represented in the other direction. It's not even that profitable, American consumers are a gold mine they're so price insensitive. And the modern world is mostly what was invented in the roaring 20s in the US, and computing technology that was developed almost entirely in the US.

(The Japanese were trailing along in the 80s I guess, but they were mostly our China, they were just a factory line that we abandoned when China caught up and their GDP has stagnated for 20 years. They had a few great companies, and they still do. South Korea is the only actual one that goes toe-to-toe but they're too small to profit off 300 million people like we can, per capita I do think they are more entrepreneurial and inventive than us though)

There's not even VC money in Europe it's almost impossible to get funded, you need American or Chinese money which means they own most of the business anyway. Like in the US, take the money away, you can get started again. But in Europe? You better buy a plane ticket. No one will fund you. The non-tech companies are mostly incumbents. Or brands like WeWork that are much more expensive than other co-working spaces but they have the brand to hold them up.

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

#257

Post by hef19898 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 9:26 AM UTC

135792468 wrote: post #82

bsanr wrote: 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 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…

Maybe off topic, but isn't that true for a lot of so-called tech start-ups in general? E.g. companies like Voi or bird? At least from the outside it looks a lot like the company with the biggest marketing budget and best marketing team wins. So basically the company that raises the most VC money wins. So a different kind of marketing.

One example I know that played out exactlly like that, Flixbus. The operations part comes from a company, meinfernbus.de, which was acquired by Flixbus (officially they merged) after Flixbus won the marketing battle over customers and had more VC money. The same happened in other countries, e.g. Austria. And Flixbus was totally aware of that and had a marketing strategy to match. Like buying AdWords against their competition and such things.

Valid strategy, but by no means a tech business.

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

#258

Post by Fnoord » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 9:37 AM UTC

jldugger wrote: post #71

droithomme wrote: post #17

It's amazing anyone buys used mattresses. The likelihood of getting bedbugs and pounds of a stranger's skin flakes is very high. Gross!

A hotel is basically a gigantic used mattress store with massive churn.

Hehe, true, but supposedly the room is somewhat sanitized.

There's an old Dutch saying "in de aap gelogeerd zijn". It means you got got scammed / got tricked / are in trouble. Literally, it means you "stayed at the ape".

As the story goes, the original meaning is that there was a hotel in Amsterdam (at Zeedijk 1) which was called "'t Aepjen" (old Dutch for "the ape"), where you stayed. Because Dutch East India Company (VOC) seamen couldn't pay their bills they paid with an ape. So if someone who was scratching themselves, the question was raised: "did you stay in 't Aepjen" (or in Dutch "ben je in de aap gelogeerd?").

Another version is that it was a pub (the oldest one in Amsterdam) where drunks met, and recruiters took advantage of this to get people to sign contracts (to subscribe for VOC).

[1] https://historiek.net/in-de-aap-gelogeerd-zijn/60549/

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

#259

Post by rstuart4133 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 9:39 AM UTC

Natsu wrote: post #247

rstuart4133 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The reports I'm relying on comes from Alice Springs, Australia, which is pretty much smack bang in the middle of a country that is mostly desert. So yeah, desert country describes it pretty well. Ambient temp there was over 47 for days at a time this year.

And yes, "no aircon" also applies. Aircon is a recent thing and most (almost all?) houses outside of the Alice metro don't have it. Hotels that leave the aircon on can still have bed bugs:

https://www.alicespringsnews.com.au/2015/11/21/finke-heenan-...

But notice this quote: "As I left they gave me a black plastic bag and advised me to keep my clothes in the bag and leave it in the sun for a few days to kill the bugs. The bags were kept on the counter so it seemed standard procedure to provide departing guests with them."

In reality most houses north of 30 degrees and west of the great dividing in Australia will kill the bugs if you lock them up in the summer letting the temp inside get 10C degrees above ambient. As it happens Australia statuary minimum requirement for workers annual holidays is 4 weeks, and it's traditional to take it over Xmas - which is our summer.

In reality most of the country lives east of the great divide, however even where I live on the coast at 27 degrees south it hits 40C ambient for few days. It doubt it would be hard to nudge it another 10, and a bed bug biting me on the arse would be more than enough incentive for me to find out.

And no, I would not be in staying in the house at the time. As you say, that would be crazy.

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

#260

Post by jjeaff » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 9:43 AM UTC

RC_ITR wrote: post #228

karim wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's straight from their S-1, page 6: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1598674/000104746920...

Yeah, but their COGS would likely include shipping, return costs, AWS fees, etc., so the math could work.

None of those things, Shipping, returns, AWS costs (unless directly part of the manufacturing process) would qualify under gaap as cogs.