Consumers

A mid-day trip to audition a potential replacement mattress got me thinking about the entire shopping experience, and my discomfort with the role of consumer. I don’t know when you might have last shopped for a mattress, but I think I can say without fear of contradiction that it is daunting. Whether you approach this online or as I did by walking into several brick and mortar showrooms the options, not only in brands but in features, materials and pricing are so complex and arcane that any reasonable person might decide to throw darts rather than try to sort out which is right for them. I did a little back of the envelope math and came up with over a hundred possible choices not counting those specific to a single retailer—and here’s the thing—there really is no way to know if any of them will confer a decent night’s sleep unless you, well, sleep on it. That’s why most brands offer a three-month trial and offer to keep trying till they get you a mattress that you like, as long as it is one of theirs. All of which sounds perfectly straightforward until you think about the hassle of swapping out your bed for another bed even once, much less repeatedly. I do not wish to be the Goldilocks of bedding and I imagine most of you don’t as well. Which as an aside makes me wonder what they do with your trial mattress if you swap it out–does it just go to the dump or maybe to some used mattress lot where a shady salesman offers deals on barely slept on models?

Think about it, most of us will have to spend anywhere from $700 to $5,000 on a mattress, not once but possibly several times in the course of our lives. Not a trivial purchase but one that surely can mean the difference between a sound sleep or a restless night followed by a morning of aches and pain. You’d think there must be a better way, but apparently there isn’t. It’s not like you can just ask a friend. Every review site—and there are dozens of those as well, will tell you that there is no single ‘best’. Everyone sleeps differently, on their side, their back, their stomach or a combination of several. And heaven help you if you share your mattress with another person because their preferences may not be yours—in fact the odds are high you won’t agree. So, there are all sorts of split solutions that complicate matters further, and even those that allow you to customize each side individually. I’m afraid I’d lie awake all night trying to figure out which of the 189 possible settings was right for me.

Does the world need all these choices, are we really the better for it? The answer for me is clearly no—there are simply a limited number of better mousetraps to be had, the rest is just marketing. By that I mean the invention of some real and a lot of pointless differences that set the claims of one product apart from all others. Most of these claims are just that, exclusivities unsupported by actual experience, but as we know if you say something often enough and add a dash of psychology you can convince a lot of people it’s true, isn’t that how politics works? I watched an experiment with a group of young children who were shown a very simple uninteresting toy and asked their opinion of it. Their initial reaction was consistent, they intuitively dismissed the toy as “dumb; weird, stupid and so on”. But as soon as they registered their opinions the one adult in the room took a phone call. When he hung up he announced that he had just heard from the President that anyone who did not have one of those toys was a baby. You can guess what happened. One by one these future consumers changed their opinion and picked up one of the toys, rather than face the prospect of being called a ‘baby’. Experts will tell you that in our capitalist system the market is the ultimate judge and jury. Let there be a thousand mattress choices and the market will quickly and without mercy level the playing field. That may be a little bit true but a walk down the cereal aisle or just about any retail experience will quickly alleviate you of that conceit. We are all subject to the same seductions as those 5 year olds.

Now to be clear I am not suggesting we should be like Henry Ford and have the option of a single car to choose from-as long as it’s black. Choice isn’t an inherently bad thing and the alternative of planned production proved a disaster everywhere it was tried for good reason. But somewhere between one and hundreds of choices there must be an island of sanity. I’m not suggesting an economic approach that is inherently better but rather that the unbridled proliferation of choice –the relentless pressure to consume has us all behaving like those kids. Almost any material thing we buy is designed to wear out, to be obsolesced, to become less desirable over time. Few things are repairable anymore and the cost to do so unless you possess those skills yourself is often so great that replacement is frequently a cheaper option. We are on a never ceasing treadmill destined to own nothing—all our possessions merely placeholders to be replaced, literally consumed as if we had digested their flesh and spit out their bones. Just visit any trash dump if you think that is hyperbole.

We are trained to be good consumers from birth. Just like those kids we started out with innate good judgement and had it schooled out of us. We knew a dumb toy when we saw it but once exposed to slick marketing appeals to our egos, and promises of a better life, fear of being left out or of being foolish was enough to convince us that maybe the toys were not so bad after all. Of course, my guess is that when the cameras were off and the kids went home the toys wound up in the trash tout de suite. If it is true in some sense that we are what we eat, it is also true that what we consume defines us. Own an oversize, lifted truck—you must be trying to prove you are good in bed, drive a certain German sports car and you are an arrogant self-important jerk. Buy this shapewear and you’ll attract the man of your dreams, the one with his gut hanging over his belt from the nightly consumption of the beer that taste’s great but is less filling. We know on some level that this is all absurd—ridiculous generalizations and outrageous promises but still we rationalize that we prefer this over that for reasons that only rarely have anything at all to do with inherent worth.

There was a time not that long ago, a few hundred years, when we all lived simply, when we made many of the things we needed with our own hands, but that was a time before we became fully educated consumers. Our rise as a consumer class is wonderfully described in David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise. Bobos is a contraction of Bourgeois and Bohemian—two movements that circa the 1960’s arose out the materiality of the post war Cup of Joe generation and their back to the earth hippie children who we know as the baby boomers. Bobo’s covet nice things—they want all the features and comforts that technology and money can buy but they want to signal a handmade, artisanal virtue rejecting the false materialism of purely bourgeois taste. In the search to find authenticity in their lives, Bobos are doomed to parody. It costs a lot to make things by hand—so most of us have to settle for the veneer, faux objects and experiences. We haven’t yet become our great grandparents that showcased their few precious bits of china and silver in a glass fronted hutch centered proudly in the museum darkened room where plastic slipcovers protected the expensive furniture from life’s vicissitudes. No, we are the Ikea generation—disposable furniture that we assemble ourselves so we can indulge the fantasy we are makers and builders. In one of his more dramatic scenes, Brooks describes the moment that death comes to claim a widowed Bobo. He arrives at her manufactured farmhouse style abode in his silver Range Rover, dressed in a hand woven Scottish Tweed jacket. Glancing around the home he observes the gleaming stainless steel appliances “the size of Volkswagen busses” and the granite countertops, the neatly stacked firewood next to the gas powered stone fronted fireplace, all the paraphernalia of authenticity. But the surprise is not what you think. There is no ascendence to Heaven just an eternity ensconced in this idealized Heaven on earth. It turns out paradise can be purchased. The only thing Brooks didn’t describe was the bedroom. I’ll bet good money it contains a king size, fully customizable, memory gel, inclinable mattress with cool wicking covers, streaming audio and soothing vibrations. I’m going to run right out and get one as soon as I sell a kidney.