This Week in Pods

Photo by Natasha Welingkar (cropped) on Unsplash.

Big news for pods this week: mattress company Casper just opened The Dreamery, which is — and I’m quoting Casper here — “a magical place in NYC where you can rest and recharge whenever you want.”

In a more literal sense, it’s a place where you can spend $25 to take a 45-minute nap in a pod.

I’m going to skip all of the news stories about The Dreamery and go straight to Racked, where Meredith Haggerty describes what it’s actually like to climb into one of Casper’s nap pods:

I was so excited, I could hardly sleep the night before. Would I be able to actually doze? Or would I spend each waking minute inside the pod trying to have funny thoughts to write here — or worse, trying to do the math on how much company money was slipping away? (No, because I already did the math the day before: it’s 55 cents per minute.)

So I arrived for a 3:30 pm nap on the first full day of The Dreamery (that’s what it’s called) — early enough in its life cycle that I was able to somewhat feasibly hope that not all the pods had yet been boned in. And I took some poorly composed photos to prove it all.

Haggerty’s review is brilliant — “It’s what I hope being dead will be like” — and if you read to the end you’ll get a full financial accounting that includes the cost of the nap minus the value of the product samples they give you to help you both sleep and wake up.

As Ask A Manager recently reminded us, bosses don’t like it when you sleep in the break room — so if you’re lucky enough to get an hour for lunch, would it be worth it to spend both cash and time on a nap? Also, if you’re in NYC and plan to visit The Dreamery, feel free to pitch me. (I’d love to share a pod perspective that isn’t my own!)

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