Forget all of the confusion, delay, and misinformation you get in a retail store - I swear they are designed to cloud your thoughts and your judgement when it comes to buying that thing you'll spend 33.3% of your time on. Not only is it confusing, but the prices are outrageous! They're borderline criminal!
Understand that the retailers have a TON of overhead that they have to cover; things like rent, TV ads, radio spots, newspaper ads, websites, payroll, commissions, payroll tax, workers' compensation insurance, business insurance, inventory, holding costs on inventory, utilities, and on and on. This stuff REALLY adds up. Let's quickly look at each item individually:
1. Rent. Rent for retailers can run as high as $30 per square foot or more in some cases! Take the price per square foot ($30) x the number of square feet (typically retail stores are at least 5000 square feet) to get $150,000 in rent per year. Divide that by 12 months to get $12,500. That's a conservative figure for monthly rent in a retail store.
OUCH! Where do you think that rent money comes from? That's right...from the SUPER-inflated prices of the mattresses.
2. Marketing/Advertising. TV and radio commercials are CRAZY expensive! Add in newspaper ads, and a paid team to keep the website updated and you're talking thousands of dollars per month to market and advertise their store to get people to stop in.
OUCH! Where do you think all that advertising money comes from? That's right...from the SUPER-inflated prices of the mattresses.
3. Staffing. Payroll, payroll taxes, salaries, and commissions are a HUGE expense. I did some research and one of the retail stores (whose name you would recognize instantly) pays their workers about $13 an hour. They pay their assistant store managers about $30,000 and store managers make $37,000 per year. District Managers make about $70,000 per year. If this is one store and the hourly person works 30 hours per week at $13 per hour, they're earning about $1675 per month. Take one hourly worker plus one assistant manager and one store manager's salary and add it up, it equals approximately $7,250 per month in salary, not including the cost to process the payroll and payroll taxes!
OUCH! Where do you think that payroll money comes from? That's right...from the SUPER-inflated prices of the mattresses.
4. You Get The Picture. Needless to say, the retailers are beating your brains in on the cost of the mattresses, box springs, frames, headboards, mattress protectors, etc.
Cracking the Mattress Code
Now here's the biggest secret of them all in the mattress industry. No one will admit to this, but I'm telling you because I think you should know:
Over 95% of the mattresses made in the USA are all made with components manufactured by the same company.
Let me repeat that:
Over 95% of the mattresses made in the USA are all made with components manufactured by the same company.
What does that mean? It means that it's ALL THE SAME STUFF! All the coils, the innerspring units, the memory foam, the padding - it's all the same!
The BIG manufacturers - Serta/Simmons (same company), Tempurpedic/Sealy/Stearns & Foster (same company), Corsicana Bedding, etc. buy all of the components, assemble the components in their facilities, attach their label and call it a (fill in the blank) mattress. It's all the same stuff!
Since it's all the same stuff, what is really important when you're shopping for a mattress?
1. The way it feels
2. The price
3. The warranty
Q: If a mattress at a department store costs $3,000 and the same mattress at a discount store (or on their website) costs $850, where would you buy your next mattress? Knowing what you know now, why on Earth would you spend $3,000 for something that you can get for $850?
I promise you, you will sleep even better on that $850 mattress because you feel better that you saved over $2,000 on your purchase.
Now you know the truth.
Sleep well, my friends...
Gene