Thank you for posting this, what a fascinating read. I recently went mattress shopping with my girlfriend, who was in the market for something like a Queen pillow top? Going into this, neither of us knew jackshit about mattresses, we just figured we'd take a look at a few places.

We ended up going to two stores. At the first store, the salesman was nice enough. He went through many of the tactics this guy mentioned, like mentioning coil count and comparing "inferior" models. We listened politely, though we had no idea what he was saying really meant. We managed to extract ourselves from that store after prying the sales guy off ourselves. Our idea was that we had rough idea of what the market looked like, and checking out another store was a good idea.

We stepped into the second store and mentioned that we had been at store x and had seen prices around price y for brand z. The sales guy brushed us off and said he didn't have that line, but that we might be happier with some other choices. Just like this guide stated!!! This guy was really pushy, he basically dragged us in circles for 15 minutes and bombarded us with info and mentioned this financing offer and that. Normally I'm hesitant to just outrightly just reject someone and walk away in such a situation, but I recognized where this was going (and my gf doesn't like rejecting people either). So I dragged her out of the store, while the sales guy half shouted at us that the prices weren't going to better anywhere else.

What a miserable experience. Luckily her roomaate had also recently bought a mattress and turned us on to a great store with cheap prices and exactly what she was looking for. At least that's what she told me, i didn't go with her on that trip... hmmph.