by The hidden costs of buying ‘blind’ and the invisible costs of retail
HIGH POINT — When a consumer buys from a mattress store, she is paying for the salesperson who can steer a side-sleeper away from a mattress that might be too firm, perhaps a return policy that absorbs the cost of returning something that just wasn’t the right match, the lease on a building where she can lie down and test the product, and all of that compliance paperwork that ensures what she’s buying won’t ignite.
These are invisible costs, because none of this shows up on the price tag.
Now let’s compare all of that to a listing on Amazon: a stock photo, a pile of unverified, perhaps even false reviews, a really low price, and a “Buy Now” button. While it’s likely the consumer has never heard of, say, ComfortTime or Fushan Jiangjing, the $225 price tag is irresistible, a price made possible by the absence of rent, a sales staff, showroom, and even certification that the product is compliant with respect to the flammability standard.
This is the core problem the mattress industry faces, a problem called blind retail. (We’ll consider the term and underlying metaphor in a moment.) Coined by industry watchers such as Mike Magnuson and Mark Quinn, the term attempts to describe what most agree is a growing slice of the market, a slice subdivided among online platforms belonging to the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Costco, Target and even Home Depot. “Blind” because consumers buy without ever touching, testing or getting expert guidance on what they’re purchasing.
In a segment of their podcast, Wake-Up Call, Magnuson and Quinn discuss the “dramatic rise in mattress purchases from big-box retailers and e-commerce marketplaces — a channel where shoppers are forced to make a ‘blind’ choice, without the benefit of showrooms, salespeople or expert guidance — and explore the implications for consumers and the rest of the industry.”
By some estimates, the “blind retail” channel now moves 14 million-plus mattress units a year by one estimate, with Amazon alone accounting for roughly 8 million of these, or about a third of the total U.S. market. It’s a race to the bottom.
Sugar, flour, bedding
When a shopper can’t test drive a mattress, compare its coil count or foam density in-person, or ask a trained associate why one model costs three times another, price becomes the only variable left by which to judge. This turns bedding into a commodity, as Dave Perry amplified in a recent column for Bedding News Now. Cruelly, commoditization punishes precisely the retailers who invested the most in differentiation and specialization via fixed costs.
This means brick-and-mortar (BAM) retailers are losing to vastly inferior bedding, and increasingly so, but not because the platforms are more efficient. At least in part, it is because “blind” also increases the odds of third-party vendors evading supervision and regulation. Catch a no-name with a mattress that doesn’t meet the flammability standard, as many flagged by a big study a year ago at the behest of Leggett & Platt could not, and that vendor simply disappears from the platform only to pop back up behind an equally obscure brand name that no one will ever remember.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Leggett & Platt for its flammability testing, conducted with an independent CPSC-approved lab, because it offers the clearest evidence yet of what this standard-dodging looks like in practice. Of eight low-cost, high-ranking Amazon mattress models tested against the federal open-flame standard (the “1633” rule), seven failed. And several failed all three required test passes outright.
These no-names were obscure only in name, because they ranked high in Amazon search visibility. How did they get that high visibility? Good question, and I wish we had access to the black box over at Amazon that holds the answers. Regardless, these no-names sold bedding at an average “Buy Now” price of about $233 per mattress, or roughly half the wholesale cost of a compliant U.S.-made mattress.
Something like 400,000 units from these failed models were sold on Amazon between 2024 and mid-2025 alone, according to third-party market data collected by Leggett & Platt.
Oh, it gets worse for BAM retailers, because the remedy offered in many of the recalls is a free replacement fire-barrier cover mailed to whoever bothers to ask. The cost of getting caught is about $10 to $20 for a cover? And that’s only to the presumably small fraction of consumers who follow up.
Hermit crab economy
CPSC’s own recall filings show that this isn’t a one-off problem but rather a pattern that repeats under new names. In one case study, a single importer was listed as the responsible party for three simultaneously operating brands selling essentially the same product. Another brand had two different named parties eight weeks apart in CPSC’s records. A third seller, Elitespace Home, didn’t even bother re-branding after a violation notice. Continuing to sell under the same name, Elitespace was cited again five months later for a different SKU.
One more disadvantage for the BAMs: Mattresses are roughly a decade-long repeat-purchase category. A no-name has almost no lifetime brand equity value at stake, and a category that’s already price-sorted rather than trust-ranked gives a new, zero-reputation seller no real disadvantage against an established one.
Burn the shell, relaunch under a new name, rinse and repeat. A hermit crab economy.
None of this is new. Amazon has been building out its platform to allow and even encourage this whack-a-mole vendor aggregation for years. You might recall Amazon entered the category directly with its own $130 AmazonBasics foam mattress back in 2018, a product explicitly positioned against upstarts like Casper, and Amazon has never had to build a single showroom to keep taking share since.
Most of the dynamics described here were in place in the clothing and fashion industry 10 years ago, when private labels overwhelmed the brands to make Amazon the second-largest clothing seller in the United States, according to Fortune.com.
What’s the solution? Like any complex problem, this one requires a complex, multipronged solution, one that combines regulation, awareness and education, creativity and a coalition. If we knew how many of these commodity mattresses are flooding the U.S. market, we would have a better sense of the magnitude of the problem.
Specifically? I’m no expert on bedding, but it seems reasonable for retailers and manufacturers following the rules to push the CPSC toward requiring proactive compliance documentation from sellers before listing, rather than the current after-the-fact, complaint-driven enforcement model. Leggett & Platt has called for exactly this.
Industry associations can keep building public pressure, as the International Sleep Products Association has done, to make flammability compliance a marketing and trust issue that consumers are educated to ask about, not just a regulatory checkbox nobody ever sees.
Retailers themselves can lean harder into the one thing “blind retail” cannot offer, which is an expert fit, a real return experience, and accountability from a company with a physical address and skin in the game.
As I’m sure you have noticed, none of this addresses the underlying price disadvantage. But, it does reframe the fight. Rather than BAM vs. platform, the frame here is accountable vs. anonymous (and pseudonymous).
Playing Scrabble
Lastly, that term, “blind retail.” Anything using the word “blind” should, if you’ll pardon the expression, get a hard look, if for no other reason than its ableist framing. And it seems to park the problem at the consumer’s door. (It also makes web searches on it really difficult, turning up lots of companies offering to replace your window blinds.)
Dave Perry recommended “unaided retail,” and I quite like that, because it underlines what the customer is avoiding by treating Amazon like a vending machine for mattresses, which is expert help. The only “aid” the platforms provide is in the form of questionable reviews and product claims that cannot be substantiated.
If the problem is parked at the door of the no-names, possible terms to describe the whack-a-mole phenomenon include brand recycling and, as I mentioned, hermit crab economy. But, “recycling” is a positive thing these days (and the web search problem remains).
Fortunately, our friends in Australia already have a term used by regulators and journalists: phoenixing. From corporate law, this term describes when a company deliberately lets itself die, often owing debts or facing liability, and “rises again” under a new name with the same operators and assets.
A rose by any other name is still a rose, and an asymmetrical war at retail by any other name is still something other than fair trade.
