My local friends, have you not noticed the proliferation of mattress shops in our fair city? The omnipresent jingles on the radio? The constant reminders that our beds are, in fact, not good enough, even if our back problems are more likely the fault of our days, not our nights? Matthew and I recently forayed into this wilderness of sleepland, and emerged with these impressions.

Mattress stores are concentrated capitalism. Perhaps it is the hefty profit margin, or the nebulous nature of the distinctions between products, or even the fact that everyone, just about, will someday pass those doors into the Enya-laden air of repose. They have every trick you can think of, and several you never ever have.

You walk into a mattress store and are confronted with a salesman and an array of naked mattresses, each coyly sporting a price tag. The salesman informs you that he can help you if you have any questions, hovers, and notes that there are many unadvertised sales (translation to people-speak: Price tags are lies to make you feel good when we tell you the real price). You lie on one, then the other… the salesman helps you in real ways, such as telling you that one over there is firmer/softer than the one you thought was too soft/too firm—and in imaginary ways that involve telling you about the Vastly Technologically Advanced World Inside Your Mattress (peopled by the dust mite race, of course).

All this one expects. Even the alternative version of “unadvertised sales”, experienced at Mattress Store #2, the “let me see if we have specially discounted mattresses in that model available at our warehouse” version… expected. The “unadvertised sale” price later inadvertently exposed as a quote devised especially for us being just over half the size of the putative price…not unexpected. The “unadvertised sale price” ending in the numbers 99? I expected that before I knew soft things to sleep on had a name! However, the sheer enormity of combining an offer to match or beat any competitor’s price on any mattress with a manufacturer system where each manufacturer makes 80 models, 6 different nametags for each model, and doesn’t publish specs, either on tags or online, for comparison shopping ease. 480 subtly different shades of soft thing to sleep on. Times about 6 brands.

The awesome majesty of capitalism spread out before me, and I saw that thousands upon thousands of grown people were dancing silly silly dances, making up names, coming up with imaginative stitch-squiggle patterns, trying to adorn industrial nylon in an appealling manner (HA!), coming up with new technologies and new names for old ones, devising new lies…just so that I would give them my money for a soft thing on which to sleep. When you think about it like that, it doesn’t seem so bad. I twitch my money and the jesters dance.