Buying Mattresses...

So, Super Thin Man and I need a new mattress. This didn't seem like a complicated purchase to me-you go, lie down on a couple of the things, buy one, and get them to bring it to your house. Bonus points if they will also remove the sagging POS currently posing as a sleep substrate.

Well. I was wrong.

First off: There are about 1000 different kinds of mattress from probably 50-ish different manufacturers.

Second: One person who will be using said mattress is slender and tall-ish and gets upper back and shoulder pain from sleeping. Since this person is so slender, there is the issue of their shoulders being much wider than their hips, so the upper back takes all the weight... The other person is...ahem...curvy and a little bit shorter, therefore having lower back pain because their body takes the weight quite differently. This results in each of these people finding different mattresses which are comfortable for them.

Third: Mattress stores are creepy. They only ever have one staff member working and rarely ever have any other customers in the store. As a consequence when a customer walks in they are practically hounded by the lonely associate and are forced to lie down on all the mattresses (an oddly intimate thing to be doing in public...) in front of a complete stranger who is trying to sell you stuff. This sets off the creepy factor quite well.

Fourth: MY GOD. You could buy a decent used CAR for what a mattress costs. And the comfy ones are all even MORE expensive. Damn. Just...Damn.

Fifth: One can find better deals online, as well as see a much wider variety of mattresses, but you cannot test them online. This is a problem. See Point 2.

So, I suppose the solution is to grin and bear the creepiness of the deserted mattress stores to find the one you like, then go online to actually buy the thing.

Sigh.