Can you get a good night’s sleep for under $1,000? One couple’s tireless quest for the ‘Goldilocks’ mattress

In search of bedroom bliss, Andrew Herrick and his wife lay on every mattress in the showroom. But could they find one that was just right?

A chiropractor once told me that anyone who pays more than $1,000 for a mattress is wasting their money. So with that in mind, in 2023 my wife and I scoured bedding outlets and factories as well as websites offering reviews and advice on how to replace our ageing queen-size slab with the “perfect” mattress. One Melbourne store suggested we buy a mattress “purpose designed to grant you your best night’s sleep, every night”, with pillows “to help you sleep like a baby”.

This was mattress land, where massive margins, perpetual sales and the fanciful hype of retail predators make the sleep-deprived easy meat. “Grant” suggested charity when the thing cost $8,599, and (spoiler alert) nobody sleeps like a baby except a baby. I scoffed at the “best night’s sleep” claim due to the wistful memory of the best I ever had – on a hessian bag filled with straw in a Tasmanian mining cabin when I was 18. But few people nowadays, including my wife, would consider the straw option unless prepared to change it often enough to avoid infestation by those bugs that beset our ancestors. Sleeping technology has come a long way since then. Or has it, I wondered, as we began our quest.

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