Simmons Bedding Company Warranty Hassle, Almost Useless Warranty Atlanta, Georgia

In August last year my wife and I bought a Simmons Beautyrest plush mattress (~$1500) at a Slumberland store. Within 5 months, it had body impressions, and after 12 months, it was getting uncomfortable to sleep on. In addition, it was developing a crack or hole right where I had my hip, that I would slide into after a few minutes in the bed.

We went back to the Slumberland store to complain, but was quickly carted out of the store again, with instructions to call their customer service number. They apparently do NOT want customers to complain within earshot of future victims (sorry, customers) ;o). We called the number and all they did was recite the Simmons warranty rules to us i.e. a minimum 1.5
depression is needed. The crack/hole they didnt care about, if it wasnt visible. We opted to pay the $35 to have a technician come out. That turned out to be a good thing, because he could feel the crack in the mattress and told us he would write Slumberland that the mattress was defective. He said, it likely happened during transport to the store or when it was delivered to us.

Slumberland got back to us in a few days after his visit and told us we would get a replacement or a store credit. We just found out it will be the store credit since, apparently, that mattress is no longer available. We are curious to see if we can use it to buy furniture instead of a new POS Simmons mattress.

My advice:

I researched some of these issues online and discovered the following: Any mattress with foam in it will see the foam lose its supportive qualities at some point - fairly quickly to judge from the many complaints online. That means that anything but a firm mattress will lose the feeling it had when new. The more foam, the worse it will be. However, the manufacturers
like foam because it feels really great in the store and both memory foam and latex pop back up to original height, even if it can no longer support your body. That allows them to deny a lot of warranty claims based on the lack of impressions. Mattresses in the old days, where they lasted 20-30 years, did not have foam in them, but rather different natural products, such as wool or cotton.

What my wife and I have done is we bought a firm mattress from a midwest manufacturer (Lebeda) (I could find no complaints about this company online) and then added a good, soft wool mattresstopper. According to various online pages a wool topper does not collapse nearly as much as foam ones do, it can be washed, and can be fluffed back up to
be softer, once it starts to feel flatter or harder. We hope to not have to replace this topper, which cost $499 online, anytime soon. However, we now believe that if you want a soft bed, you need to get a firm bed and invest in a 3 mattress topper that you can discard when it inevitably collapses. If you dont want to spend this much on the mattress topper, places like Sams Club sell 2.5 memory foam ones for around $90 in queen size. The one we had lasted a little less than a year, in our old firm bed, but maybe thats the price you have to pay to sleep well. We hope the wool verison will last a lot longer.