I continued my travels through the west coast of Florida, searching for the perfect mattress and local manufacturer. The latest target:
Pittsburgh Mattress Company.
The Cliff's Notes: don't bother unless you want foam but want it to feel like a spring bed.
This is a traditional local manufacturer, factory in the rear with a small showroom in the front. Very similar to InnoMax, the PMC showroom is a true product showroom, not a glaringly lit sales floor crawling with parasitic salesdroids. Its relaxing, though a bit cluttered and haphazardly laid out. One thing that stood out in contrast to InnoMax was that all the beds - every single one of them - had pillow top quilting. I felt like I had walked into an AARP-affiliated bedding store.
The lone sales person available was a pleasant lady whose name I never got. I told her the short version of my story (several back injuries and suffering on a collapsing Tempur), and made plain my desire to stay on memory foam, but also to be open to a memory foam/latex hybrid or full latex bed.
She pointed me at first to a full latex with a pillow top, which wasn't very comfortable. She explained that it was a latex over innerspring construction, with a box spring foundation. I told her that I didn't need a foundation since I was going with a platform, and that I definitely didn't want a coil mattress, regardless of whatever the top layer consisted of. She asked me to try the mattress across from it, which was a split king sitting on a motorized foundation. She said that every other display mattress was on a box spring and that split king was the only one which would feel like a platform. It was not comfortable. I sank through the comfort layer and felt the ultra firm foam beneath. It felt like an extremely firm bladder underneath a standard foam bed. I asked her if the other side of the split was the same mattress, and she told me it wasn't - that one had memory foam on it.
At that point I started wondering if we had some communication barriers because I distinctly remember I began my visit by telling her that I was leaning towards a memory foam topped mattress, but I just decided to ignore this minor glitch and kept trucking right along...
I rolled onto the other side of the split, and I immediately noticed it was more comfortable, but it didn't feel like memory foam, or at least any mf I've ever tried. While I laid there, she went over the construction of their beds and showed a cutaway of one of their mattresses. She pointed to the pillow top, which she proudly announced had a full inch of padding sewn into it. She waxed rhapsodic about the high quality of the foam materials that the owner buys, the local construction and the warranty.
When I finally got to the end of the Declaration of the Greatness of Pittsburgh Mattress Company, I reiterated that I was looking for a memory topped foam bed, or a memory/latex hybrid. She said, "Well, thats going to be expensive. You know that latex is very expensive, right?" She said that their decent quality latex king was going to be over $2300, and a latex/memory bed would be about $3600. I was too stunned to even debate that, so I attempted to thank her for her time and get out of there, at which point she went back into the second and third verse of "My Mattress Company tis of Thee". This time I heard about how common it is for a typical foam mattress to collapse within ten years - she was surprised that I only had a 3/4 inch dip in my Tempur after 12 years - and the PMC foam is such high quality that it never collapses, ever.
I listened patiently and when she finished I told her that there was nothing they could really do for me. They completely negate the benefits and even the basic effects of memory foam by insisting on using those inch thick quilts on top of it. Memory foam is heat and pressure reactive - how can it even receive body heat when it has an inch of Dacron in between me and the comfort layer? She pointed out that I was complaining about sleeping hot and that layer would keep that from happening.
I also found out that they make their mattresses double-sided, which I think makes sense for a coil mattress, but for foam? She told me that it doubles the life of the mattress by allowing that layer to "rest" and come back from having my weight on it. If I have an 85lb mattress with memory foam on both sides, the bottom layer will have the full weight of the mattress, plus me and my girlfriend, compressing it for the whole time it lays on that side. Flipping it just means a side that has been compressed for 6 months is now allowed to expand, but I'll be laying for 8 hours a day on that formerly compressed side, so how could it really recover effectively?
Besides... don't they offer this amazing, high quality foam that never collapses? Why do I need to flip it at all?
The saleslady went for a chorus of "We Can Build What You Want" before finishing the last verse of the song, and part of that was to lecture me about locally built, high quality, great warranty, etc. We finished by me explaining how Tempurpedic makes their mattress (support/transition/comfort layers, along with a sausage skin fabric to unify the layers, along with a zippered fabric/rubber cover), and the need for the memory foam to have access to body heat, and I hit the bass note by explaining that SelectFoam and InnoMax both offer king beds with great features for under $1400. I was able to leave then while she was catching her breath.
Ok, this review has turned into a diatribe against a company with some very lame designs and some very high prices. The Cliff's Notes is that people who want a foam, latex, memory foam, or foam over coil bed that looks like your grandmother bought it at Goldblatt's in 1970 and has basically none of the benefits of a foam mattress should drop what they're doing and head over there as soon as possible before those people realize that they have traveled through time and landed in 2013.
If you're willing to overlook the poorly thought out beds, the warranty service, as explained to me, is phenomenal. They offer within-the-day service on warranty issues, as in pick it up in the morning, correct the problem, and have the bed back that afternoon. Very good idea, and something you're only going to find at a local manufacturer.
Any questions?