It's my bed in a box!

(my bed in a box girrrrrl)

The last mattress I purchased was a memory foam bed in a box from Amazon for $400 five years ago. It was an absolute dream to sleep on and made me feel like a god damn genius for only spending a fraction of the more popular bed in a box solutions named after a friendly ghost. This past winter, however, nearly 5 years to the day of my last mattress purchase, some moderately painful back and neck nights/mornings led us to decide to look into getting a new mattress and "upgrading". (Cue Morgan Freeman's voiceover) Little did he know, he would embark on a dark and painful journey filled with Google Sheets and numerous data concatenations.

I generally like to take the road less traveled whenever possible. If something is popular, I tend to travel against the current (or at least do this subconsciously). This is also the case when it comes to consumer purchasing. Instead of going with the first brand name bed in a box (which from this point on I will now refer to as BIAB, because acronyms), I looked at some of the other lesser known brands to see what sort of deals were out there. After a brief argument with my girlfriend over why I refused to go with a popular name brand, I put on my analytical (and stubborn) thinking hat and decided to gather all the data/metrics I could about all the other possible BIAB solutions out there. Here's what I found: Mattresses are all the same shit with more or less the same contents and wildly different price tags.

At first glance at this spreadsheet, you're probably thinking "whoa, this guy has too much free time on his hands." You're 1000% correct. I also like being right, and even more, I also like being right with supporting data. I combed each mattress vendor site scrutinizing their respective sales, offers, promo codes, and deals, I threw this all into this central spreadsheet and called it a day. I even shared this spreadsheet in my work Slack channel hoping to help any other poor mattress hunting soul, and they wrote about it in a blog post.

Fast forward about 60-ish snooze-full nights on this new Nectar mattress we purchased. Morning back pain is something I've kinda always had but it got to its worst point one Saturday ago, rendering me barely able to get out of bed and lean over. We tried to "return" our Nectar mattress, only for them to offer us a 2" foam mattress topper instead, to which we politely declined. Then we were offered a discount off the mattress sale price that would be refunded to us if we kept it, once again declining and asking for a full refund. Then we were advised there were no mattress pickup options available in our area (in lower Manhattan, none? Really?). Our options were to donate it for free (not possible or very unlikely due to the current COVID times), or spray an "X" on it and place it in a dumpster, and then, and only then, after providing photographic evidence of the destroyed dumpster fire mattress, would they issue a refund. Luckily, we were able to "donate" it to a friend and get a full refund.

Now we are proud Casper mattress owners and my back pain and stiffness have almost entirely followed that of the Zune (it's gone). Long story short, listen to your significant other and go with the "popular" crowd. Your back (and significant other) will thank you later.