It's been a tough year for the bedding industry. Retail bedding sales have languished in recent months, and the industry appears headed for a year of essentially flat unit growth.
So I shouldn't have been surprised by some of the price-cutting that made headlines during the just-concluded High Point Market. But, frankly, I was.
Some very unusual moves raised eyebrows throughout the industry.
In a press briefing with me at market, Sealy officials announced a series of price rollbacks in the flagship Posturepedic line, and in the luxury Stearns & Foster brand. The Sealy rollbacks brought pillowtop models retailing at $899, $999 and $1,099 down by $100 each...Read More
I don't want to insult the (bedding) manufacturers or retailers, but it feels like a racket to me," said Meredith Vieira, co-host of NBC-TV's "Today" show, after watching a story on the show on the difficulties of mattress shopping.
Well, Meredith, you did insult the mattress industry. But the "Today" show story, "Don't lose sleep buying the perfect mattress," which aired Sept. 26, was an even bigger insult. Janice Lieberman, "Today's" consumer correspondent, found little she liked in her examination of mattress shopping.
There is certainly some truth in her central assertion, that it's difficult to do comparison shopping in the mattress industry. But Lieberman is painting our industry with much too broad a brush. A great many bedding retailers operate with integrity and honesty, really want to meet co...
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It's time for a change of pace from talk of warranties, hot retail concepts, luxurious latex, etc. This week, we share some fascinating insights into beds and sleep from the eclectic mix of books that occupied us this summer.
We start with Winston Groom's "1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls." Groom, the author of "Forrest Gump" and several history books, writes about the tragedy and triumph of that pivotal World War II year. Along the way, he also tells us about the history of the phrase "taking to the mattresses."
As Groom describes how military wives near Pearl Harbor took refuge from the attack that morning, he notes that "some hid under mattresses." That leads him to this footnote: "The expression 'taking to the mattresses' was a time-honored tradition in Sicily, lower Manhattan, Chicago, and oth...
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