Are You Kidding Me?

When you spend your spare time on news aggregation sites looking for business-related items to blog about, the way I do, wretched excess very quickly fails to amaze you any longer. The idea that there are $40 bottles of water for sale, or $6 trays of instant ice cubes (“Just pop it into your freezer!”), or even $10,000 cell phones becomes an accepted fact, and you find yourself becoming jaded in a very specific way. I grew up in Southern California, within driving distance of Hollywood, and may therefore have been a bit more susceptible than most to losing my sense of wonder (or outrage) at people overpaying for common items simply to prove that they could; western Los Angeles county is full of businesses that operate on the principle of providing exactly those sorts of goods and services to people. That said, I still think that paying $69,000 for a mattress set is absurd…

A story posted in the Life & Style section of the Wall Street Journal website profiles two of the companies that make these “super-premium” bedding sets, including the most expensive American-made product (the E.S. Kluft & Co. Sublime mattress set, at $44,000) and the somewhat pricier European equivalent (The Vividus set from Hastens Sangar AB, of Sweden). These hand-made products include a number of highly expensive materials, such as cashmere, mohair and silk, to form the layers of the mattress, and hand-tied steel coils to support the higher layers. Yet, despite the jaw-dropping price, these sets still retain the typical service life of an ordinary inner-spring mattress: between 7 and 10 years. To put this in perspective, that’s the equivalent of spending $822 a month, or $190 a week, just for your bed, before you even consider a bedroom to put it into…

Or, if you prefer, it’s the equivalent of purchasing 18 top-of-the-line Tempurpedic mattress sets, each of which has a twenty-year warranty (with a service life estimated at 30 years). Alternately, you could describe this product as costing effectively 55 times as much as the best memory-foam equivalent – which wouldn’t really be a jaw-dropping excess, except that the super-premium products also don’t have the same resistance to stains, liquids or dust mites you get from the less expensive product. There’s also no reason to believe that spending 55 times as much will actually assist you in sleeping any better; at least, there’s been no scientific evidence to support that position. All of which leads me to question if there aren’t better uses for one’s money…

Now, I’m not going to tell anyone how to spend their money; that’s your right by virtue of your having earned it in the first place. And speaking as somebody who has had to endure sleep studies, decades of insomnia, and clever machines that blow air up your nose while you’re asleep to keep you from snoring (and, in extreme cases, dying), I can honestly say that there are very few things that are better or more important than a good night’s sleep. It’s just that at current prices you could purchase a house in the Lansing area for monthly payments lower than what these mattress sets would cost you, and in 30 years you’d own the place and the land underneath it, free and clear. I can’t help thinking that if I had that kind of money the real estate investment would appeal to me a lot more. But that’s just me…