The best way to research a mattress purchase

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t involve 40-minute videos of people pressing their hands into mattresses. It doesn’t involve 12-page forum posts comparing the rebound speed of a Saatva medium to an Avocado medium-firm. It doesn’t involve numerical indexes where mattresses are rated to four significant figures on qualities like “tensility” and “flexure,” nor lessons in the construction of mattresses that are so exhausting, by the end you’re ready to sleep on any mattress at all.

You may be very tempted to do Internet research on which type of mattress to buy. It can be fun. It feels useful. It feels necessary. In a weird way, you love it.

Don’t. I am sorry to be a killjoy, but it’s a total waste of time.

There is one, and only one way to research a mattress purchase: Try out mattresses in a store. In an hour of lying on different mattresses, you will learn far more than in fifty hours of reading about them. I speak as someone who did the “deep dive” into mattress research and developed a precise idea of what I wanted, only to find——when I actually lay on some mattresses——that my idea was wrong. As I swiped credit card on a mattress I actually did love, I could not stop thanking God that I actually visited a showroom before spending $800.

If you think the money-back guarantee on your blind buy will solve the problem, think again. Will you really want to take the mattress back off your bed and haul it to the post office, just because you liked but didn’t love it? (Can you carry it? Can your car carry it? Where will you even sleep?!) Never mind that you won’t know what other choices are out there and how they compare. I don’t suggest it.

I do suggest going to a mattress showroom featuring direct-to-consumer mattress brands. Many major cities have one. Though these stores are usually independently owned, chains like Sleepare exist, and a few major mattress stores now offer direct-to-consumer galleries. Wherever you are, I recommend making the trip. Even a few hours of driving is less hassle than returning a mattress, or enduring a subpar one for 10 years.

If you’re already spending several hundred to several thousand dollars on a mattress, you might as well spend it right. The Internet doesn’t help you do that, but showrooms do.

Tl;dr: Go to the store!