I negotiated!

I have been thinking about buying a new bed for a few weeks now, since T and I decided I would be leaving our old bed at the house. Anyway, I've been putting it off for a little while but tonight I decided it was the perfect time so I went to the mattress store. According to the internets (which are never wrong), you are supposed to negotiate for mattresses just like you would negotiate for a car. I had no idea about this, and I have totally been getting screwed because I have always paid the price as marked. Anyway, as I pulled into the parking lot of the mattress place, I began to get pretty anxious about going in there and getting what I needed. I sat in my car in the parking lot for a few minutes, just psyching myself up, then I finally went inside.

All of the websites about shopping for a mattress say to take your time and really lay on the mattresses as you would at home, try your favorite sleeping positions and really just get comfortable. I totally did this on several different mattresses and it made a definite difference because there were some that were comfortable when I first laid down that were not so much anymore after I had laid there for ten minutes or so. This taking my time thing is very out of character for me, so I was happy that I was able to make it work. The salesman was friendly but not too pushy while I was trying the mattresses out, and for the most part he left me alone.

I wanted to try one of the schmancy foam mattresses (think Tempurpedic) and see if they were all they were cracked up to be, so that's where I started. They were all marked pretty far out of my price range so I wasn't too attached to the idea of getting one. That is, until I actually laid on one. Holy crap, that shit was comfortable! As I was laying on it, the sales guy came by and said that they had 'just had a sale' on these (yeah right...there's always one sale or another going on) and that he was going to 'check in the back' and see if they still had any left at the sale price. The sale price was about half of what was listed on the price tag but more than I was planning to spend, so I just stayed quiet. I tried some more traditional spring mattresses and there was one that I liked pretty well but I kept coming back to the foam one.

I decided to just see how good of a deal I could get him to give me on the foam mattress, so I told him that was the one I was interested in. He gave me the 'sale' price and then started adding on things like delivery, the box spring, a frame, etc. Hundreds of dollars more. I told him I had intended to spend about $300 less than the 'sale' price for just the mattress and he was like "ooh..yeah...we can't go that low for that bed". I remained quiet and waited for him to counter with something a little closer to my offer and he poked away at his adding machine and came up with a price that was below the 'sale' price and also included all of the extras he had added on top. I had read that you should try to get them to throw in things like sheets or pillows if you get to a point where they won't budge on price, so I asked him about throwing some sheets in and he did. Small victory on that though, because they're 200 thread count and since I bought some 800 thread count sheets a month ago, I have been a total thread count snob. But it made me feel better to get them thrown in anyway.

So if you look at the actual retail price of the mattress (which in reality nobody ever actually pays), I ended up saving over 50% plus getting a bunch of stuff thrown in. Granted, the sales guy did most of the price cutting for me by mentioning the 'sale', so I'm guessing I probably ended up with a pretty fair price for what I got. I'm still proud of having negotiated though, even if it didn't save me a million bucks. And also, now I will have a bed to sleep in on moving day! A schmancy foam one! Woo!