Businesses come and go but we always seem to have mattress stores around…lots of them.
If you’re going to try running a retail company, a mattress store is the way to go. There are more mattress stores in this country than there are Starbucks.
A market research firm called Ibis World says the United States has nearly 16,000 mattress stores and they bring in $14 billion.
The average mattress costs between a few hundred dollars up to, say $2,000.
And the mattress store commonly marks up its prices by 40 to 50 percent. So that gives mattress sellers big profits on just one sale.
Most mattress stores need to sell fewer than 20 mattresses per month and their costs are covered.
They don’t have a lot of overhead, many don’t carry a large inventory in the store. They keep mattresses at a nearby warehouse and ship them to you, the customer.
Some stores even ship directly from the manufacturer. They can sell mattresses without ever having to manage their products and most employees work on commission.
So the stores have low overhead and keeping them open isn’t costly and besides, most customers aren’t conformable enough yet to buy a mattress online.
Buying a new mattress is a big deal to you, you’ll sleep on it for at least eight to ten years.
Remember that markup: negotiate the price of a mattress or the cost of delivery or the price of hauling away your old mattress.
And sleep well.
