Mattress, Mattress Everywhere And Not A One I Like

Vicki Briganti – CW50 Writer / Producer / Editor

Keep this in mind if you're in the market for a new mattress. Get ready for a fight if you decide you don't like it. Mattresses are hard to return. You'll probably lose money. My advice is to annoy your salesperson with questions about the store's return policy and get everything in writing.

I was lucky in some ways as I set out to return my first backbreaking Serta mattress (Mattress Sale Results In Back Pain And Sleepless Nights). The nice lady in the customer service department didn't notice I'd owned the mattress for five months. Their policy is returns/exchanges after 60 days.

I went back to Store A knowing I was out the $70 delivery fee plus a 10% restocking fee. Maybe I should buy a cheaper mattress this time? My saleslady reassured me that if I didn't like the next mattress, I could return it, too, minus another $70 delivery and 10% restocking fee. I didn't get this in writing.

Since my favorite mattress had been a flippable Serta pillowtop, I went online to see if a company sold them, even though I'd been told they didn't exist anymore. Guess what? All those salespeople are wrong. US-Mattress.com sells them and has brick and mortar stores in Plymouth and Commerce. I drove down to the Plymouth store after work and tried the flippable Serta Perfect Sleeper Sapphire Suite Pillowtop in a queen.

If I Knew Then What I Know Now

Thus began a routine that continued for the next six months. I would go to work. After work, I would start my part-time job lying on mattresses.

At this point, I had no idea how a mattress might affect my lower back after eight hours. How can you know for sure by lying on it in the store for ten minutes? Well, I would go back to the store multiple times, in different moods, and lie on the mattress until the store closed. Exhausting. Aren't you exhausted just reading that?

After several trips to two different stores, one being the US-Mattress in Plymouth (a 40 minute drive from my house), I decided since Store A would return the mattress and US-Mattress only offered exchanges, I would take my chances with Store A, hindsight being 20/20. That meant I would need to return all the king-sized bedding and repurchase these items in queen. I approached each mattress as if it were the last one I would buy. Ha, ha, ha.

I scheduled the exchange. The delivery team brought the new set; however, there was a problem. Since my house built in 1918 is small, they couldn't fit the queen box spring up my staircase. They had to lay the mattress on my bedroom floor. They said I'd have to call and order a split queen box. Did you know such a thing existed? Neither did I.

Even after all those trips to try out the mattress in the store, of all the mattresses I would soon have in and out of my home, the Serta Sertapedic Ainslee Eurotop Plush was, by far, the worst mattress. I slept on it while it was on the floor. No bed frame. No box spring. I felt like a college student. I hated it so much; I immediately called my saleslady to cancel the order of the split queen boxes. In doing so, I saved a little money. I'd now have to pay 10% of the cost of the mattress only, plus the $70 delivery fee.

But. There was yet another problem. Store A's customer service department refused to return this one. I told several service reps that my saleslady told me I could. They didn't care/didn't believe me. I kept calling until I reached an unfriendly manager who had no compassion and resolutely refused to return it. Wasn't it punishment enough I was sleeping on the floor, my couch, or an air mattress, sometimes all within the same night, getting only five hours of sleep? She wouldn't budge.

I Want My Old Mattress Back

I almost gave up trying to return it until a co-worker insisted I call my saleslady at the store level. When I did, she said, "Oh, you don't like the new Serta? You want to exchange it for something else?" I explained the trouble I was having with customer service. I ended up talking to her manager and returning everything via the furniture department. What a fiasco. The whole process took weeks and many phone calls. The store employees were helpful, but the bottom line was, I still didn't have a bed.

Thankfully, what I do have are supportive parents. I remember driving to my mom's house in Howell at 6:00am on a Saturday morning because I couldn't pretend to sleep on that Sertapedic mattress one more second. The strangest part was I had no problem sleeping on the guest bed my mom bought in 2007. It felt out of reach, but that twin Spring Air Back Supporter Bay Point Plush gave me hope I might one day find a comfortable big girl queen mattress of my own.

Stay tuned for future blog posts to find out what happens next in the continuing saga of the backbreaking bed(s)….

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