What If You Want to Return That Mattress You Ordered Online?

Ron Lieber tests mattress companies’ trial periods.

I’ve always had two thoughts about those “order a mattress online and try it out free for 30–100 days” companies:

1. How hard would it be to get a free year of mattressing by stringing all of those different deals together? Casper’s 100-night trial would get you through a third of the year on its own.
2. What happens to the mattresses when you send them back?

I still don’t have an answer to the first question—although I’m sure an indomitable lifehacker is out there somewhere, trying to learn the answer—but I do have an answer to the second one, thanks to the NYT’s Ron Lieber.

Buying a Mattress Online Was Easy. Now, About the Return.

All five of the companies I tested charged me nothing for the return. Only Saatva charges any shipping or delivery fee, and its $99 covered three guys showing up at my apartment with a plastic-wrapped mattress and carefully carrying it inside. The other four companies compress their mattresses and cram them into boxes for shipping, though Casper offers free courier delivery of the box in my neighborhood.

What happens next is where it gets interesting. These mattress companies are not, thank goodness, repackaging slightly-used mattresses and shipping them to new customers, but that means the mattress companies have two options:

1. Donating the mattresses to charity, which is more difficult than it sounds (unsurprisingly, you can’t just show up with a used mattress and expect a charity to be grateful; they’re more concerned about whether you’re bringing a fluid-soaked bedbug sack into their establishment).
2. Calling the local junk hauler and hoping that some company down the line will be able to recycle components of the mattress before it ends up in a landfill.

Read Lieber’s article to learn what happened to the five mattresses he tested (and returned), and then sleep on this question: is this method of selling mattresses better than the “go hang out at a furniture showroom until you’ve made your decision” method? Or are we literally padding our landfills with preventable mattress waste?

Also: how many people just keep the mattress they ordered because they feel guilty about sending it back, or are worried that sending it back will be too much of an effort?

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