Choosing Between Good & Good
You have spent hours testing mattresses in showrooms and heard plenty of advice, often contradictory. You have had your questions and concerns addressed, conceptual confusion clarified, criteria expanded and then reduced back down to the fundamentally important. You have narrowed down your selection to a few potential candidates, by extension ruling out what was likely hundreds of choices you could have made from local and online retailers.
Yet you may still struggle to decide which mattress to take home. The decision isn't just about the money; the stakes are higher because sleep is vital to our quality of life. This means that no matter one’s budget, people may find themselves slightly paralyzed to pull the trigger. Not buying a new mattress is also a choice that carries its own cost, in a different form of ‘currency’.
Perhaps some of us yearn for the freedom of choice to be limited, spurning the wealth of options made possible through competitive markets. Hoping to be relieved of the ‘burden’ of making the choice between good and good. If only the options were clearly bad and good, this would be easier to choose.
Some of us may also rationalize not participating in the testing process altogether, often stating, ‘I can’t possibly know which will work until I sleep on it’. I used to get defensive about this objection; now I simply accept it and run with it to its consistent conclusion. The truth is that even if someone has a mattress delivered, and we get what I consider the best possible result, a glowing review from the client: ‘Best money ever spent, most comfortable mattress I have ever slept on’. Even in this scenario, the client still wouldn't know with certainty that they chose the best possible option in our stores. The experiment will not be repeated under the same conditions. What you can know with certainty is that you made a good, rational choice given a context of knowledge. That is what our principles help to inform and enable.
We have very high standards for our products. Our clients are choosing at the margins of good vs. good.
From another aspect, I hope we have made it easier to choose, knowing that the one thing we can do is have rational standards and principles in mattress design that significantly lower the risk of someone ending up with a ‘bad choice’. Our Zippered Forever Beds also help, as they let us adjust the mattress at any time in the future.
Very few people find an elastic mattress uncomfortable; sometimes, we tweak the firmness to the client's taste after the fact. We have great tools in the toolkit to do this. So please take the pressure off yourself to make the ‘perfect choice’. Don’t punish yourself for not being omniscient, but rather a fallible human being making a choice between good & good.