How to Buy a New Mattress Without a Ph.D.
The disrupter economy has set its sights on your bedroom, offering gel capsules, ice fabric, green-tea memory foam, and copper-infused toppers. Will they help you get a better night’s sleep?
How much more comfortable is a mattress that costs sixty-one thousand dollars than one that goes for a few hundred bucks? What’s the difference between products from brands with names such as Nectar, WinkBeds, Purple, and Saatva? Do Avocado mattresses contain avocados? Does haggling still work? Is “Ambien-injected kosher crypto-foam” a real thing? Patricia Marx answers these questions and more in an uproarious exploration of the world of mattress shopping, which is at once more convenient (thanks to online ordering) and more confounding than ever (see above).
It’s always a good idea to follow Marx into whatever corner of human experience or consumption catches her piercing eye, whether it’s the ins and outs of service pets (dogs, pigs, alpacas?!), decluttering, couch surfing, or robots. Here, in mattress world, she notes that a doctorate in the higher sciences might help, and, perhaps more important, “a master’s degree in marketing and bullshit will also come in handy.”
—Ian Crouch, newsletter editor
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