You know you have heard the ads on the radio and TV…“We’ll beat any advertised price or your mattress is FREEEEE!”. Annoying, huh? Sometimes funny, but getting old the longer they run on the air. Anyway, you might have heard that ad at some point and thought about going to them with a competitor’s ad, hoping to get a free mattress. Well, sorry to tell you, but it will never happen. And here is why:

The same mattress is sold under different names at each store that carries them.

Yep, that’s right. Say you see an ad for a mattress at Store X called…um…”Sleepytime”. So you take this ad to the above non-mentioned store (but you know who they are) and expect them to beat the price or give it to you for free. However, once you get there, you see that they do not sell the “Sleepytime” mattress. They have another one called “Nappytime” that looks the same, but they tell you it is a different model, and they cannot beat the price on the one you brought in, because they do not carry it. In fact, if you bring an entire mattress ad from another store into their store, you will not find a single one of those mattresses in their store. Thus, they never have to match and/or beat a single price, because they do not sell anything that anyone else does. Well, in reality they do, but it is called something else, so in their “rulebook” they don’t.

However, some big chain stores carry the same names, but not all of them. That is why it is best to just pick a store you feel comfortable buying from, find a mattress you like that they sell, and then either buy it or wait for them to put it on sale. Driving around from store to store with different ads will get you nowhere, as you will never find the same mattress in two different stores. Just a little bit of friendly advice for those of you about to drop $1,000 or more for a new mattress. We ended up getting ours at Sears on a year end clearance, and the one we got was $1200…on sale from $2500. End of the year sales at big chains is a great place to get mattresses, because really, how much are they going to change from one year to the next?