About four years ago when I was very, very ill my parents bought a new twin mattress for me. The old one had lasted something like 20 years or so with off and on use. This was a top of the line Sealy Posturepedic Won’t Budge An Inch[sup]TM[/sup] mattress. With the box springs and frame it totalled around $440.
Fast forward to recent times, I have only been getting about 5 or 6 hours of sleep per night. I’ll wake up with a sore back and am unable to go to sleep. This had made me an unpleasant individual. I just happened to stumble upon the receipt for the mattress and so I called the place where I bought it: Bedrooms Today. On my first attempt at calling I got what I thought was Mr. Helpful. It was a Sunday afternoon when I first called and Mr. Helpful said that my bed was still under warranty (yay) and that on Monday someone would call me and set up a time to come out and look at the mattress to determine if it was a warrantable concern. So far so good.
Until, it’s about 6 days later and I’m calling them back again. I get a different person this time who takes my number and says that when the manager gets in, he’ll have him call me. Fast forward to 5 days later. I call back AGAIN and get Mr. (not so)Helpful again. This time he tells me that what I need to do is take some pictures of the bed, measure the sag in the mattress, and send him my results. Oh, and by the way, if there are any stains on the bed, then the warranty is voided anyways.
So, why in the fuck couldn’t have have told me all of that almost 2 weeks previously??? And to add insult to injury, the mattress is slightly stained from the time 4 years ago when I was originally sick. I think that I can take the stains out of the mattress, but I don’t want to risk it in case they decide not to warrant it because I’m very sensitive to smell and I don’t want to try to sleep at night with the fumes from the cleaning chemicals.
And just because he’d already proven himself to be a moron, I looked up the mattress warranty and it says:
So, at this point all I can do is rant until I come up with a better solution. Or else just buy another damn mattress. :mad:
I understand that there is some sort of hierarchy of salesmen, where new car salesmen outrank electronics store salesmen who outrank used car salesmen, etc. Those who can’t hack it at the higher levels fall down into the lower levels.
Now, think about used car salesmen. Think about the three levels of sleazy and incompetent salesmen below them. Think down two more levels, and that’s about where you get mattress salesmen. On a good day.
I think that The Consumerist folks would be very interested to know that any stain on a mattress means that a major unrelated problem with it is not covered.
When we bought our mattress we were told that compression of even a cm in the pillowtop was a defect, and would be covered. Now, ours probably does have “body” dents that are about that deep after 5 years, but it’s not a problem so we haven’t tested it.
I was told that for the warranty to count, they had to be quite large - “body impression” was normal. I said “Body impression? I was raised to call that ‘sag’.” I got a nervous chuckle out of the salesman.
What REALLY sucks is that these days most of them are only one-sided!
The whole ‘warranty’ on the mattress is, IMHO, a huge joke. They set up conditions in the fine print that will void the warranty if you happen to use the mattress at all.
You can remove the tag as the consumer, but if you take it off it voids the warranty. Why? No real reason. They can not resell a used mattress. The only reason they want a stain free/ tagged mattress is to resell it. It’s all bunk.
Sagging of over 1 1/2 inches is a warrantable defect. And this bed has a 10 year warranty. Why shouldn’t I get a new one, then, when my bed ‘sag’ is 1 7/8 inches.
Also, it seems to me that the stain is inconsequential when it is unrelated to the defect. In fact, the stained area and the sagging area are not in the same vicinity.
Mrs Prosequi had a similar complaint about a badly sagging not so old mattress, which she took up with the manufacturers. Because it was more than 12 months old (not much more, by the way) they drew attention to clauses in the guarantee which said that we had to pay $80 to have someone from their company come out and “assess” the problem. If their assessor agreed that the problem was bad enough to justify a warranty claim, we could get the $80 back.
However, if we wanted to go through with the claim, we had to spend another $50-60 (non-refundable) to cover transporting the mattress to and from their factory to get it fixed (some sort of internal surgery on the springs, I gather).
It was galling. We just bought another mattress.
And the brand of the first mattress that caused us grief? Why, the same as the OP’s (not the same model though).
Yep, it appears to be going the same way here. If we need them to transport the mattress for us, it will be $53.74. However, after I got that email, I got another one stating that I MEASURED INCORRECTLY. :rolleyes:
Being entirely sick of this bullshit, I finally asked my father to get involved. He’s much more persuasive than I am. We’ll see what happens from here.
