http://www.businessinsider.com/mattress-firm-conspiracy-grows-after-accounting-problems-2018-1

Mattress Firm is the largest specialty mattress retailer in the US.

Some argue that the company has too many stores, sometimes in high concentrations.

A comment on Reddit that suggested that Mattress Firm was laundering money went viral on Tuesday but has since been removed.

Mattress Firm's parent company recently disclosed "accounting irregularities," Reuters reported.


If you've ever wondered why there seems to be a Mattress Firm on every corner in your city, you're not alone. But one explanation for this phenomenon is more extreme than you might expect.

On Tuesday, a comment on Reddit claiming that Mattress Firm, the largest specialty mattress retailer in the US, is a money-laundering operation went viral — but it has since been deleted, The Next Web reported.

"Mattress Firm is some sort of giant money laundering scheme," a Reddit user wrote, adding: "I remember seeing 4 mattress firms all on each corner of an intersection once, and there is no way there is such a demand for mattresses."

This caused an outcry on the Reddit thread.

Mattress Firm, which acquired Sleepy's in 2015, now has over 3,500 stores, sometimes in high concentrations. But Reddit users argue that there are too many, especially given that it stocks a product that people typically buy every seven to 10 years.
------------

I laughed.. but then I thought about it. I ain't NEVER seen anyone in any of these Mattress Firm's. lol.

We tried to go into one a few months ago and dude had the front door locked. We had the stroller and everything. Store was supposed to be open but he looked at us like "go away, I'm busy"

on our kaing size mattress & our daughter's mattress...
and she used to talk about how she'd go a full 10hr shift (they were required to do 10hr shifts btw) and see 3 customers...on a SATURDAY lol...
They sent them away for "training" which was basically high pressure sales tactics, etc...
They legit sell mattresses indeed...but there's DEF. something amiss....


"Get ready....for your blessing....."

We are always the only ones in the store.

WTF do you do all day besides sleep on those mattresses?

dude was cool as shit. The entire time my wife and I were in there, though, (about an hour), not one other customer came in. lol. Me and dude yucked it up for most the time, talking about Football. He was a Steelers fan from Pittsburgh and going back that weekend for a game. Turns out our birthdays were 3 days apart, same year. Dude hooked me up with one of those $100 gel/cooling pillows for the L-O-W.

i've even looked in the windows and not seen employees in some.

about how there are so many mattress stores.

Not sure if it was Planet Money, Freakonomics, or something else.

The puzzle, of course, is that people generally go into a store to buy a mattress maybe two or three times in their entire lives. So if each one serves a population of about a thousand, then on average they'd sell something like 15 mattresses per year (I'm being super rough; I'd bet the real number is closer to 100/year). So how could there possibly be so many showrooms?

The answer, as I remember, came down to two things: for one, there's relatively low overhead cost. Especially nowadays when a lot of retail stores are going out of business, the real estate is pretty cheap, you generally only need one dude to staff the showroom at a time, and people aren't buying mattresses off the floor, so you don't need to regularly restock it.

The bigger issue, though, is that because people buy mattresses so infrequently, it's one of the (actually very few) markets where there's a really high retail markup. They might make the mattresses for like $50 and sell them for $800 (I actually have no idea how much mattresses cost, but that's the point!), and people are willing to pay that because it's a one-time deal and that's the going rate.

There's more to it, I'm sure, like monopolies and inefficient distributions of retailers, so nobody has an incentive to undercut competitors. But the main point is that, perversely, the fact that people rarely buy mattresses makes it MORE possible to have a lot of showrooms.

one of their best eps

You can bet your nuts there’s gonna be a Mattress Firm, nail shop, and wing place. There’s 2 locations across the fucking street from each other. If one wasn’t situated down a hill, you’d be able to physically see one while standing at the other. (The two on the East-West Connector in the Target plaza and the LA Fitness parking lot.)

Promised us shit then reneged too.

Fuck those guys.

cuz they stay in business and it ain't never nobody in there

It was an African dude with the New York baggy gear and he had no interest in letting us into the store

Shit was empty as hell too.

I had a joke but I lost it.

I was called about an interview... then a week later they said they were moving with other candidates....

supports some of the ideas expressed above in this thread

https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3265/why-are-there-so-many-mattress-stores/



Dear Cecil:

How do mattress stores manage to stay in business? They're all over the place, but the average adult buys a mattress once every five to ten years. With high overhead and infrequent purchases, how are they around? (This question was inspired by a friend, Bethany.)

Not Bethany

Illustration by Slug Signorino

Cecil replies:

I see your query, NB, and raise you. To my mind, it’s not just about how these stores manage to stay in business: the question is, moreover, how are there so goddamn many of them — particularly right now? Where I live, in Chicago, entire blocks are all but overrun with the places, which frankly don’t do much for a street’s aesthetics. In June a Texas Monthly article described the worrisome proliferation of mattress stores in Houston, where the venerably groovy Montrose neighborhood has become known as “the Mattrose” on account of all the new sleep shops. An April headline in the Northwest Indiana Times asked, apropos the town of Schererville, “Why the heck are so many mattress stores opening?” So: you and I aren’t the only ones wondering. What gives?

One thing that jars about this state of affairs is that, in the age of Amazon, there’s something very old-economy about mattress stores, beyond their relentlessly cheesy look. No one goes to bookstores to buy books anymore, right? Well, not exactly. A 2014 report by the consulting firm A.T. Kearney found that despite the digital hype, overall a full 90 percent of retail transactions still take place in physical stores. And according to an investor presentation by industry giant Mattress Firm, dedicated mattress stores account for 46 percent of total mattress sales, handily beating out furniture stores (35 percent) and department stores (5 percent) for the largest share of the market.

So mattress delivery by drone is still a ways off. But again, these stores aren’t just surviving, they’re flourishing — that market share has more than doubled in the last 20 years. Why open a mattress store when there’s another just down the street? Turns out the economics make perfect sense:

Running a mattress store doesn’t cost much. Since each store is essentially a showroom, with the product delivered to your home from a warehouse, sellers don’t keep a lot of inventory around. And the salespeople generally work on commission. So contrary to your assumption, overhead is actually pretty low. Plus, the uninhibited signage at these places provides constant free advertising.

The industry is benefiting from postrecession catch-up. According to the trade journal Sleep Retailer, the global mattress market saw a decrease in sales in 2008 and 2009; in the years since, the rebounding economy — including increasing home ownership — has occasioned “remarkable” growth in the industry, says SR, expected to reach $25 billion globally by 2017. The U.S. is the largest retail mattress market worldwide.

The markup is stupendous. This is the big one. Mattress markups are notably higher than for other furniture items: Consumer Reports puts gross profit margins on mattresses at 30 to 40 percent, both for wholesalers and for retailers, and up to 50 percent for makers of super-luxe products. One estimate (from a boutique mattress upstart, so take this with a grain of salt) claimed that mainstream retailers can charge $3,000 for a mattress (after wholesale and retail markups, marketing costs, and commissions) that actually cost only $300 to produce. What accounts for this? It’s your classic oligopoly, where the market is dominated by just a few makers — think familiar names like Serta, Sealy, et al. More on this below.

Certain ancillary factors are working in the mattress-pushers’ favor too. Newspapers and lifestyle magazines provide great propaganda in the form of endless encomiums to getting a good night’s sleep, and the well-publicized resurgence of bedbugs certainly plays nicely with the industry’s attempts to get you to replace your mattress more often.

On the principle of Chekhov’s gun, if I use a loaded term like “old economy” in the first act, we’ll be talking about “disruption” here in the third. And lo: some not-exactly-disinterested observers say it’s high time to disrupt the mattress industry, which has been described variously as a “scam,” a “racket,” and, as suggested above, an “oligopoly.” Critics are galled by a system wherein retailers charge exorbitant, and wildly variable, prices for products whose differences from one another are often (a) slight, and (b) described in nonsensical language — e.g., “ComforPedic iQ” with “Ultra Cool Memory Foam” and optional “AirCool Memory Foam with Micro GelTouch.” (Lots of product labeling is similarly nuts, of course; on the other hand, you’re not dropping $2,000 on a razor blade.) They point to the eyewear business, which has similarly been called oligopolistic, where the entrepreneurial upstart Warby Parker found success selling cheap glasses to hipsters. Whence the white knight of mattress sales? I found an article profiling one contender whose cofounders show the right credentials—both have Silicon Valley backgrounds, one’s got a great beard—but if I were a mattress seller, I wouldn’t be losing any sleep just yet.

Cecil Adams

figure they are washing money overseas

but yea this nigerian cat told how he couldnt believe the mark up on beds and furniture in the US...when its all just wood and foam

but even the markups dont explain how there can be so many stores with 1 customer every 6 hours.


so for how deep the rabbit hole goes-
some anonymous group put out a report on the mattress firm parent company cooking books

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-12/faceless-men-upend-south-africa-stocks-on-fears-of-steinhoff-2-0

https://viceroyresearch.org/2017/12/06/steinhoffs-skeletons-off-balance-sheet-entities-inflating-earnings-obscuring-losses/

stock plunged 80% , chairman and ceo both quit, like 3 diff accounting firms are doing audits, redoing the finances for past 3 years, classaction lawsuits, and like 3-4 different countries are caught up in it. its approaching that breaking bad madrigal level conspiracy, just need to find the blue meth inside the mattresses

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-south-africas-steinhoff-could-be-next-enron-quicktake-qanda/2018/01/15/30dc0d92-fa38-11e7-9b5d-bbf0da31214d_story.html?utm_term=.7ad4a8f537c8


dude who took the main hit was in the top 5 richest men in south africa.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/bainbridge-island-inventor-of-the-waterbed-banks-on-a-wave-of-nostalgia/


Millennials: Waterbeds are returning, and Bainbridge Island waterbed inventor wants you


Originally published January 27, 2018 at 6:00 am Updated January 27, 2018 at 11:15 am

Still an inveterate tinkerer at 71, Charlie Hall plans to test-market a new, improved model of the waterbed, which became a long-running fad after he introduced the first one 50 years ago in San Francisco. Now a millionaire inventor, he lives part of the time on Bainbridge Island. (Dean Rutz/The Seattle Times)
A 1970s brochure helped explain the waterbed to a market that had never seen anything like it before. (Dean Rutz/The Seattle Times)
This ad ran in The Seattle Times on Dec. 4, 1982, for the Bedroom Emporium. That $299 sale-priced waterbed would cost you $755 in today’s dollars. (Erik Lacitis/Seattle Times archives)


Still an inveterate tinkerer at 71, Charlie Hall plans to test-market a new, improved model of the waterbed, which became a long-running fad after he introduced the first one 50 years ago in San... (Dean Rutz/The Seattle Times) More

Ready for the return of waterbeds? Charlie Hall, the Bainbridge Island inventor of them, has a comeback planned 50 years after their debut. And he’s looking at you, millennials, to get groovy.

By Erik Lacitis
Seattle Times staff reporter
Millennials, the inventor of the waterbed has a message for you. Especially those of you living right here in the Pacific Northwest, like he does.

You need a waterbed.


Charlie Hall is 71 and a millionaire because of waterbeds and some of the other 40 patents he holds. (You know the Sun Shower, with the solar-heated bags that let you bathe when camping? That’s his.)

He’s planning on the waterbed making a comeback this spring.

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“I don’t think a millennial has ever seen one,” says Charlie, as everyone calls him, about the invention he debuted 50 years ago at a “Happy Happening” art show in San Francisco.

“But I have this theory that it’s a Northwest kind of thing. I feel like a lot of us spawned in a waterbed.”

And so those younger types, “Maybe they want to visit the spawning ground.”

That first waterbed was called “The Pleasure Pit” because, as the oft-repeated sales pitch went in that groovy era, “Two things are better on a waterbed, and one of them is sleeping.”

Working with a good friend of his from the waterbed days — Keith Koening, president of City Furniture, with 16 stores in South Florida — he is about to test-market Waterbed 2018.

No more rigid frame that made them hard to get out of. Now there’s foam around the edges. New materials suppress the wave action that some customers didn’t like. Dual bladders allow each side of the bed to have its own temperature control.




It’s not like Charlie needs the money from the Return of the Waterbed.

He has a ranch home in California wine country and another place in that state, and about 15 years ago he bought a home right on the Bainbridge Island waterfront. Looking out through the big windows, he has a straight-on, unobstructed view of downtown Seattle. During nice weather, he spends a lot of time on his 55-foot cruiser, going around the San Juans.

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Still, he’s an inveterate tinkerer. He can’t help it.

That Sun Shower is part of the catalog for Advanced Elements, of which he’s co-founder, although these days not involved in the day-to-day operations.

“It keeps me young, to be active and engaged in a lot of projects,” says Charlie.

But are we ready for Waterbeds 2.0?


If history is to repeat, once again it’ll be that male customer who’ll plunk down the cash.

The ads back then sometimes featured women in slinky outfits, or no outfits at all.

By May 1970, Charlie Hall’s waterbed was featured in a Playboy magazine spread, in an issue that included a story on “The Fiery Feminists” and “An exclusive interview with William F. Buckley Jr.”

“I remember we had to do the bed in velvet, I think maybe green velvet,” remembers Charlie.

Subtlety was not part of the waterbed ethos back then.

Some came in gargantuan, four-poster wood frames such as a “Jungle Bed” advertised in June 1976 in The Seattle Times for a special sale price of $450, which is $1,953 in today’s dollars.


For Charlie Hall, it’s a long way from his days as a 24-year-old industrial design student at San Francisco State University doing his graduate school thesis.

“I always liked furniture and I wanted to address human comfort. I talked to doctors, physical therapists, even some psychiatrists, trying to put together elements of comfort that work,” he says.

For example, there are whirlpool baths taken by athletes — “letting your muscles relax, that soothing sensation associated with floating,” says Charlie.

From that came his first effort, a chair filled with a kind of viscous starch.

“It was not practical. It weighed 300 pounds, and you couldn’t move it unless you had a forklift. And you kept sinking deeper and deeper into it until it was hard to get out of,” remembers Charlie. “I also decided that a bed was more important. It’s the piece of furniture used most in the house.”

Then he had the epiphany of using water inside a vinyl bladder, made for him by a company specializing in PVC.


Charlie got an “A” on his thesis, and the waterbed revolution was on. Although it didn’t magically take off.

“We had a little shop in Sausalito, and we would deliver them on top of a Rambler station wagon,” says Charlie.

One of his customers liked the beds so much he helped raise $100,000 in funding. Celebrities began to notice the new fad.

“One of the Smothers Brothers bought one, and somebody in Jefferson Airplane bought one. I remember we delivered that one to a big Victorian house that was painted all black. Getting the bed in there was hell,” says Charlie.

On June 15, 1971, he was granted U.S. Patent No. 3,585,356 A for a “Liquid Support for Human Bodies,” the waterbed.

That didn’t deter the copycats, who ignored his requests for royalties or licensing fees.


It wouldn’t be until 1991 that Charlie was vindicated when a jury awarded him $6 million in a patent-infringement lawsuit against Intex Plastics, a company that imported waterbeds from Taiwan. He then began receiving licensing fees.

The waterbed craze lasted for nearly 20 years.

A 1986 New York Times story quoted the Waterbed Manufacturers Association as saying they accounted for 12 percent to 15 percent of the American bedding market, and that back then they had $1.9 billion ($4.3 billion in today’s dollars) in annual sales.

They were so popular that the California Civil Code says landlords can’t discriminate against people with waterbeds, as long as they have waterbed insurance. In Seattle there is no waterbed legislation, although some rental agreements either prohibit waterbeds or require proof of insurance.

Then waterbeds practically disappeared.

“Probably bad marketing,” says Charlie. “It got to be price wars. Retailers were presenting $99 specials and selling a very crappy product. It spiraled down from there.”


Sometimes, he says, what was sold to college kids was just the bladder — no frame. “You can imagine a bag of water on a college dorm floor. Not a good idea,” he says.

Charlie says that there also were a lot of myths associated with waterbeds.

Like they were so heavy that they crashed through the floor. No, he explains, “Forty pounds per square foot is a normal building load on a residential floor. Waterbeds don’t even come close. It’d be a third or less.”

Or, they’d leak all over the place. No, says Charlie, “They have safety liners that take care of any leak issues.”

He does say that it was because of waterbeds that the mattress industry changed. It showed you didn’t have to settle for some rigid spring coil bed.

“Memory foam, pillowtop mattresses, all that stuff began to appear,” he says. “Look at the ads for the memory foams — they read like all waterbed ads.”


Now it’s a new day.

Fifty years later, don’t you think this could fit you, too?

Seattle Times, June 8, 1978, in a feature about waterbeds:

“ … the avant-garde youth took to them like protest marches.”

Any slight movement was like a damn wave pool.

So hard to get out of and impossible to really smash on one.

<=========================================
https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PYzh4v9cSf4FDnq3yMQyqNqh79o=/800x0/filters:no_upscale%28%29/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4079674/jlio.0.gif

b/c of all the monies inside.

peace & blessings,

x.

www.twitter.com/poetx

=========================================
I'm an advocate for working smarter, not harder. If you just
focus on working hard you end up making someone else rich and
not having much to show for it. (c) mad

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mattress-firm-bankruptcy-20181005-story.html

Mattress Firm files for bankruptcy, may close up to 700 stores
Tiffany Kary
Bloomberg News
October 5, 2018 9:10 AM

Mattress Firm, the troubled bed retailer of Steinhoff International Holdings, filed for bankruptcy in Delaware along with more than a dozen affiliates.

The Chapter 11 petition Friday from the Houston-based company listed more than $1 billion in both debt and assets, and includes units of well-known brand names such as Sleepy's and 1800mattress.com. Among the largest unsecured creditors are Simmons Manufacturing and Serta Mattress.

The company plans to complete a restructuring within 45 to 60 days, closing poorer performing stores, and has a commitment of $525 million in senior secured credit to fund its turnaround, according to a statement. Mattress Firm says on its website that it has more than 3,000 stores across 49 states, and will keep operating as usual as it moves through a restructuring.

"Leading up to the holiday shopping season, we will exit up to 700 stores in certain markets where we have too many locations in close proximity to each other," Steve Stagner, CEO of Mattress Firm, said in the statement.

The company said the bankruptcy includes a prepackaged restructuring plan, meaning it already has the approval of key stakeholders, but will still need court approval. Steinhoff said last month it was evaluating ways to attract extra funding, and bondholders were said to be considering a loan of about $300 million into the firm as part of a bankruptcy filing.

The company didn't immediately return a message seeking comment.

I dont know about other cities but out here in Durham they're all over the place. Mattress Firms are literally across the street from Mattress Firm.