How to buy a mattress without losing sleep

if you don't snooze, you lose Before you buy, it pays to spend time on the ticking. Take 15 minutes and lie on the mattress in your usual sleeping positions.

Shopping for a mattress can be a nightmare. In fact, Consumer Reports receives more inquiries about mattresses (3,300 since 2001) than about any other product except cars.

The reason is that shoppers are flying blind. It's hard to tell one box of metal, foam, fuzz, and fabric from another, making you vulnerable to a sales pitch. Model names differ from store to store, making it impossible to comparison shop. And prices vary so much that the $1,300 mattress set you look at one day can cost $2,600 the next. We know; that happened to us.

To explode mattress misconceptions and expose what many retailers don't want you to know, Consumer Reports shopped in all kinds of stores, interviewed mattress makers, and polled visitors to our Web site, ConsumerReports.org, about their buying experiences. We hired two retired industry insiders, with a combined 87 years of experience, to tear apart 18 beds from Sealy, Serta, Simmons, and Spring Air, the top-selling brands. Our objective: to point out differences among low- and high-priced models.