Welcome to the Mattress Morgue

Welcome to The Mattress Morgue.

There you are, standing in a mattress chain store looking at a sea of flat white rectangles. All of the big name-brand mattresses with their colorful displays, labeled with exquisite sounding names like “European Serenity Plush”, and all different price ranges from $300.00 to over $3000.00.

You try a few out and they are feel great – any mattress is probably going to feel better than the one you have at home. The more expensive they are, the plusher they feel so you probably assume they are made from higher quality materials and will last longer to justify the higher price.

Unfortunately, you are about to become a victim of what we feel is the biggest scam in the mattress industry – the pillow-top mattress.

This is why I have created The Mattress Morgue. We have been selling organic and specialty sleep mattresses since 2005 and we have hauled away hundreds of old mattresses. The idea behind The Mattress Morgue starting when a customer came into our store needing to replace their existing mattress. This mattress was high-end name-brand 15″ pillow-top that was only three years old and cost over $3000.00. They felt really burned by this name-brand manufacturer and wanted to buy an organic latex mattress that was customizable and would last for many years.

When we arrived to deliver their new Savvy Rest Organic mattress, there it was – a massive 15" thick King-size pillow-top mattress with two significant body impressions. I had seen the “Mattress Morgue” pictures on the Savvy Rest website so I just had to find out – what was inside this $3000.00 mattress that failed in three years?

So I took my “cadaver” and cut it open – it is the actual mattress in the picture above. Inside this $3000.00 mattress was a simple 6″ innerspring with 9″ of layers of cheap polyurethane foam. This mattress had no more than $200.00 worth of materials inside. We have the foam from this mattress at our store in a bag that you can see in person.

I became obsessed (like “Dexter” from the Showtime series, just without the blood!) and started doing “autopsies” on numerous mattresses, mostly pillow-tops, of all shapes, brands and different thicknesses.

Here is the scary part – they were all made practically the same way. You can see from our “autopsy” photos that all of them are just innersprings, a layer of resinated fiber clippings pad on top of the springs, then layers of cheap polyurethane foam. These components are required to be listed on the white law label at one end of the mattress – take a look at yours. To make a mattress plusher, and more expensive, these name-brand manufacturers just add another layer of foam. For every $5.00-$10.00 layer of foam, the retail price of the mattress typically goes up about $200-$300.00.

You can look at these photos and make your own decision but before you buy a pillow-top mattress, read the other articles we will be posting on this site soon – they will be about the “planned obsolescence” of name-brand mattresses.

The top layer of any mattress is eventually going to develop some degree of a body impression so our advice to you is if you really want a pillow-top type of mattress, we recommend that you choose either a mattress with a zippered top that allows you to change the comfort and/or replace the foam or latex with a new layer OR purchase a mattress with a separate removable and replaceable topper. These are the type of mattresses we have at The Healthy Bed Store.

Thanks for reading this post and make sure you read the rest of the series. It will help you understand more about those “white rectangles” and what do if you currently have a body impression warranty issue.

Tempur-Sealy has threatened us if we use this brand name. This mattress surprised us with something we have never seen before in our other “cadavers”. This mattress is made from 68% Polyurethane Foam, 7% Resinated Textile Clippings Pad, and… 25% Molded Polyurethane Foam. There is actually a hard foam around the lower half of the innersprings that broke off in pieces – you can see the residue on the innerspring unit.