The Mrs has decided we need a new mattress. We’ve had our current one for about 8 years and apparently it’s reached a point where it needs changing.
I don’t know why. It doesn’t look, feel, taste or smell any different from the day we bought it in my honest opinion. I go to bed, fall asleep and then wake up in the morning. If I have to get up in the night it’s due to my prostate being 60 years old and nothing else.
We’ve just been to an industrial estate and looked around a few bed specialist shops (I guarantee none of them will still be there in 3 years time), and the choice is astonishing. It struck me that the mattress market must be the most bloated, ridiculous, bullshit-filled load of toss going.
You can buy soft, medium soft, medium, medium firm, medium hard, hard, rock-hard and fucking extra rock-hard. You can get memory-foam, pocket-sprung, combination, gel, traditional spring, natural, latex and fuck knows what else mattresses. You can pay a couple of hundred quid or the equivalent of a good quality used car. Some of them were about 2 feet thick with some strange extra layer on top, you’d be sleeping so high up your fucking nose would be scraping the ceiling.
The thing is apart from some feeling a bit harder than others I honestly couldn’t tell any difference between the ones I tested. It struck me that I’ve slept in any number of beds over the years when we’ve been on holiday and I can never remember waking up and thinking I’ve had a rough night’s sleep because of the mattress.
I genuinely think I could go into one of these shops and pick a mattress completely randomly and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to me.
So is it just me? Do any of you need a mattress that ticks all the boxes for you to get a decent night’s sleep given your age, ailments etc? Or is it all a load of old bollocks?
Agree 100%.
Like you, I have slept in any number of beds over the years and not once have I woken up and thought “That mattress is shite”.
I’ve had my current one for sixteen years, and it’s still going strong.
Provided it hasnt turned into the superbowl and you spend the night holding onto the edge, I see no problem.
Converse is also true, if you’re hanging onto the edge of the bed in case you might fall out, your mattress isnt the problem.
Went to a furniture retailer a good few years ago to look at beds, happened to know the store manager who applied his staff discount to our purchase.
Showing us one particular bed, he asked us to lay on it and guess the price of the mattress.
We were both way out with our guess, it cost £12,500.
Chelsea had been pre season training in the area, and the club bought 25 of them.
Idiots.
FWIW, the right choice of pillow is far more important
I have a very bad back and mattresses make a hell of a difference. It’s a nightmare finding one that suits me. They should last 10 years though up until I buggered my back I kept mattresses for a life time.
Sort of disagree - in the 2000s, I was traveling a ridiculous amount for work, and was sleeping on a wide variety of mattresses. I had been used to sleeping on a futon (I like firm), but the wife demanded something a bit softer. We bought a mediocre queen size, but I started paying attention to which ones I liked at which hotels. I eventually decided that my favourite mattress was the one the Westin was using at the time, so went into a decent mattress store and asked for that. Took them a little while to identify it, but it is still my favourite 17 years on. We will probably rotate it out to the lake place, where the mattresses have been mediocre as long as I can remember.
Always wanted a bit of “bounce” in the mattress.
Never wanted to ever stay in those hotels with those overly soft mattresses.
And as far as pillows go , I reverted to the old Indian bit of having cotton pillows and changing the stuff there once a year of not earlier.
Provide better back support and much more cheaper.
I bought a Premier Inn bed and mattress as they use the same one in all their hotels and I have always found them to be very comfortable. They even came and “installed” it.
Manufactured by Silentnight…
Agreed with this and @Flobs.
I think though that many people genuinely don’t feel the difference, whether it’s because they are unaware and put bad sleep down to other factors, or if it’s because they are genuinely unaffected.
The last bed I bought in Britain was custom made by these guys:
Not cheap, but very good. I went for a bespoke bed as I had suffered a severe back injury at the time. I’m not sure how much the bed helped compared to the physio and opiates, but my back did get better.
I’ve got a terrible one at the moment.
Where I am from, mattress is the derogatory name for a promiscuous girl.
Haha, over half a century ago, in my little corner of the world, it’s oil drum.
What’s the reason for that…
Agree,there is a hell of a lot of crap,but as has been pointed out, if it doesn’t feel like sleeping a a crater,that is half the battle.I slept in probably thousands of beds and that is the big no no.
That said we bought our most recent mattress about 14 years ago and it is still perfect.Cost a bit but it was worth it!
Absolutely no way there’s a thread dedicated to mattresses. This isn’t real.
At last. Someone has created a thread about mattresses. Long overdue.
I’ve always slept on shit mattresses. Until I got into my forties and found myself waking up every morning with chronic back and shoulder pain. At that point we went big, and bought a really expensive one.
More important through was the pillow. I bought a really expensive pillow. I think it was about £150. Whatever it cost, it was the best money I’ve ever spent.
I’m not going to take this lying down!
