Shopping for a new mattress has got to be one of the most difficult experiences there is. Not only do you have to lay down in awkward positions in the middle of a store, but you've got a salesman staring at you the whole time and trying to convince you the mattress will solve all sorts of problems you didn't know you had. And it's not like you're buying a chair. If you screw up and buy an ugly chair you can always stick it in the bonus room, but if you screw up and buy a bad mattress you're going be stuck sleeping on that thing for at least a few years.

Each store seemed to have their own gimmick. Some had mattresses cut down the middle to show you the padding and springs, some had cashmere covers on the mattresses to make them feel soft, but my favorite has got to be this sleep pressure profile shown below.

This place had a pressure-sensitive bed hooked up to a computer that's supposed to match you with the perfect mattress. All the data and graphs were even shown on a huge 60 inch TV for dramatic effect. As you can see from my pressure profile, my perfect mattress must accomodate multiple heavy lumps in my back and a head apparently made of lead.

This sophisticated mattress matching technology isn't cheap, either. It was hard keeping a straight face after we learned the cheapest mattress there was $3599. Needless to say, we looked elsewhere and eventually went with a much more reasonably priced synthetic latex foam mattress made at a local store. So far, I've been lucky enough not to have any "capilary shutdown" or "nerve entrapment."