Bizarre. I've bought three mattresses brand new - Two identical Sertas from the same sales guy six months apart (the ex took the whole bed - which was lame, as it was a $1500 frame and a $800 pillow-top) and a not-bloody-bad Ortho for like $600, which I sold on Craigslist a year later for like $300 because the remaining Serta came down to California. My experience with mattress salesmen is that the shady ones are shady from space while the honest ones are mostly interested in selling mattresses. As there is nothing inherently bad about mattresses, there need not be anything inherently scammy about selling them. You can separate the wheat from the chaff with one simple sentence: "I never buy anything on the first day." The scammers will walk, the legit ones will say "Huh - that's an interesting position" or the equivalent and move on in their attempt to sell you a mattress in an honest and non-predatory fashion.
Mattress Guy 3:27-3:31The sales associates know all of this very well, and the way they see it is that every person that walks into their territory is going to buy the product very soon. When a sales shark, excuse me, sales associate knows this, their confidence is heightened. The fangs grow longer and they begin to drool a little bit. Oh, sorry again, I mean they become a bit more aggressive. The sales associate, knowing their prey is going to buy, will not hold back much when trying to make that sale happen on that day, in their store, on their terms.
it's a technique I developed at Circuit City. "No, Redshirt, I won't be buying a VCR today. I'm looking at VCRs, I will listen to what you say, I will take your card and should I decide to buy one tomorrow, I will call you up and let you know I'm coming. But for now, YOU ARE NOT MAKING A SALE." They will answer your questions in a clipped and business-like fashion, they will attempt to leave you alone, and they will leave you to find better quarry. I applied the technique to automotive, motorcycle, mattress, and furniture sales. "Not buying today" will cause salespeople to treat you far more humanely, particularly when you make it known that it's a personal maxim that you live by, you're not backing down from it, and you feel no particular interest in explaining it and the more they harry you the less likely you are to purchase from them. A confident salesperson who is connecting his product to the people who want it knows that getting paid tomorrow is every bit as good as getting paid today and he will recognize that this peculiar idiosyncrasy of yours isn't difficult or onerous to navigate. A pit viper will bail. I was looking at used cars once. Drove a late-model 3000GT. They dropped from 19k to 17k in the amount of time it took to run my credit, but I wasn't interested in spending that much. A week later I called the same dealership about a later-model Eclipse at $11k. They offered me the $17k 3000GT for $11k. When I bought one a year older from a different dealership for $9200 I had a pretty good idea that I was actually reasonably close to the bottom on that car, whereas with the pit vipers it was pretty clear that they started the bargaining at orobanche uniflora prices.