Mattress clearance sale

If you are in the market for a new bed or mattress you will no doubt spot the stores and online retailers with advertisements like -

Mattress clearance sale
Huge savings on mattresses and beds
One day only mattress sale
and so the list goes on

You will also see similar promotions on some of the TV selling channels where a particular model of bed is being sold at what appears to be an unrealistic price.

So what are these "deals" and are they really as good as they appear to be?

The answer depends on a number of factors, but no mattress that a retailer normally sells for £1000 ($1500) is suddenly going to be offered at £200 ($300).

For this to be the case the mattress would be sold at a loss and no retailer does this. If they did they would be out of business in a flash.

So when is the deal genuine?

One of the many “tricks” that manufacturers and retailers use to entice customers to buy a particular product is to have a Recommended Retail Price that is considerably higher than the actual in-store or online price that they ticket the mattresses with.

This Recommended Retail Price is a price that no retailer ever expects to sell the bed or mattress for, but it does enable them to say that you, the customer, can save “X” amount of money on this mythical Recommended Retail Price.

It all sounds impressive, but in reality the so called discounted price that you see is only the price that the bed retailer always intended to sell the bed for.

So what about special offers and one day deals

In order to get people through the door, gain publicity, and occasionally to clear out old stock, retailers may sometimes do a special one day or one week sale.

Equally, a store may take a single model of a single bed and discount that one bed massively, again to get people through the door. This is a "loss leader" and it is based on getting lots of people in the store, all hoping to get a deal when the deal is very limited – sometimes to a single item.

Of course if you are the person who gets that bed you are on to a winner, however the whole thing is a marketing and publicity ploy aimed at getting more people through the door.

How can you tell if a deal is genuine?

Prices of beds and mattresses vary because different retailers have different buying power and they get different discounts based on the number of any particular manufacturer’s products that they sell.

Other factors can include store or retailer overheads and the margins (profits) that the store want to make.

The best way of evaluating a Good Deal is to do two things.

• Look at the price of any discounted beds across several different stores to see if they really are discounted. If all the stores have roughly the same price, then that clearly is its normal retail price and not a “special” discounted price. It may still be a good bed, but it is not a discounted one.


• Compare the build quality and features of any so called discounted bed or mattress with equivalents sold at other outlets, or produced by different manufacturers. In other words look at the spring count, memory foam density, finish quality etc and see what kind of price a mattress with that type of specification normally retails at. If you get a similar price, then again you are not getting a genuine saving.

Both of these factors will tell you if the deal is really a deal, but your main objective in buying a bed or mattress should be to get the best that you can afford, so think quality rather than price and go for an orthopedic mattress if at all possible.