This is a subject matter about which I admittedly know little. What advantage(s) can there be to use flat sheets instead of fitted ones. Will they (the flats) eventually go the way of the dinosaurs?
Possibly, but they’ve got the hotel industry using them, so I woudn’t count on them going out of buisness just yet.
The advantages of a flat sheet, according to a hotel housekeeper I know, is the fact that you don’t have to keep them in sets as you would a fitted sheet. When it’s time to change the bed, all a maid has to do is grab two sheets off of the pile without worrying if she has a “top sheet” and a “bottom sheet.” If you tuck the bottom (flat) sheet securely beneath the mattress, the flat sheet should stay in place just as well as a fitted one.
Another plus for flat sheets, especially in hotel or other high use situations, is that you can have stacks and stacks of them neatly folded. A fitted sheet doesn’t fold as easily.
I’m a little perplexed here - you seem to be assuming that most people use only one sheet per bed and that it goes on the bottom. I’m a two sheet kind of person (but never 3 sheets to the wind these days) - a fitted on the bottom and a flat on the top. It makes it much easier to get between the sheets that way.
Actually, they all used to be flat, back in the days when my granny was stitching her own. Fitted sheets only became possible when people stopped making their own mattresses and started buying them and mattress sizes became standardized.
Besides, we can’t get rid of flat sheets - what would our ghosts do? I doubt I’d be very scared by an apparition wearing a fitted sheet.
(Oh dear, I’ve said “mattress” too many times. I have to go stand in the tea chest until Mr. Lambert recovers.)
Hotel and institutional sheets are washed frequently, and usually at high temperatures to kill germs. The elastic in fitted sheets would die long before the cloth in this situation, so flat sheets also have the advantage of being longer-lasting.
Precisely. Frankly, when I did the OP, I did not even think of the top sheet. I use a fitted sheet and a top spread. That said, the points made about hotels are quite valid.
To some lesser degree people like myself will continue to buy flat sheets because we dislike the way fitted sheets actually “fit” the bed. I am a hospital-corners kind of person and dislike how standard fitted sheets tend to crease and wrinkle as I sleep. Of course fitted sheets are less labor intensive so most people seem to just buy the fitted kind, to the point where i have a hard time finding standard bottom sheets in many stores (at least in a decent thread count and color variety).
I actually had to mail order my last set and managed to get some 300ct Egyptian cotton sheet sets in bone and pale vermillion for under $100 for each set so I totally lucked out.