> It's really hard to know what's a good price for a mattress.
I don't understand this at all. You can Google and have all the prices right at hand, so comparison shopping by number isn't hard.
You can go to a mattress store and lay on a handful of mattresses and figure out pretty quickly what you like - is the pillow top or foam too soft? Do the coils poke too hard? Too firm? Too heavy for you to move when you need to do the sheets? - You admitted to doing this yourself.
I could never see myself buying a mattress from a company like Casper personally. Returning something like a mattress because you don't like it has got to be a level of hassle that I can't even begin to imagine being worth it, vs just making sure you bought one that you're comfortable with in the first place.
Yes, it is. The major mattress stores each have their own custom SKUs to defeat comparison.
> You can go to a mattress store and lay on a handful of mattresses and figure out pretty quickly what you like
To some extent, but there's a wear-in period on a new mattress. It takes my body a few days to a few weeks to get used to any new mattress; trying to figure out how that's going to go from a few minutes in a store isn't super effective.
It’s such an infrequent purchase that you don’t have a baseline for what is a good price or not. It’s not like when you’re buying food and you always buy bananas for $1 and you stop to grab a few items at somewhere new & bananas are $2 so you don’t buy them cause you have a baseline.
It’s the same exact thing you seen in automotive sales, how do you tell if something is a good price? Well looking at the car compared to other cars in that area may help but what about one model vs another and so forth.
So go lay on a mattress or test drive a vehicle, all that does is tell you if you absolutely hate the item in question not if you actually like it so you add a wide range of prices on very similar items with unlimited reviews or information on them it’s incredibly overwhelming.
Caspar & others (Tuft & Needle) did a great job with the market by appealing to those concerns. 100 night free trial (T&N) and if you don’t like it, we’ll arrange to pick it up/drop it off at a homeless shelter or similar. Casper did something similar.
Once a decade or half decade larger purchases without a baseline is incredibly stressful for most consumers.
> It’s such an infrequent purchase that you don’t have a baseline for what is a good price or not.
Well, we have Google now.
But if you're willing to buy something of that price range without doing a little bit of research then it's an issue.
I had to buy a mattress recently (because the one I had bought online - for a discount price - sucked). I went to the store and tested the different models.
Though I agree the once a decade thing complicates things.
I don't understand this at all. You can Google and have all the prices right at hand, so comparison shopping by number isn't hard.
You can go to a mattress store and lay on a handful of mattresses and figure out pretty quickly what you like - is the pillow top or foam too soft? Do the coils poke too hard? Too firm? Too heavy for you to move when you need to do the sheets? - You admitted to doing this yourself.
I could never see myself buying a mattress from a company like Casper personally. Returning something like a mattress because you don't like it has got to be a level of hassle that I can't even begin to imagine being worth it, vs just making sure you bought one that you're comfortable with in the first place.