What is the best time of year to buy a mattress? That’s a question that may be more important to many to have answered than it might seem at first.
Why? A mattress is a large, and far from inexpensive purchase. Adding a new mattress to your bed – and therefore your bedroom – will cause more than a little upheaval too, especially if it needs to be ‘off-gassed’ first, as many mattresses do. The answer is quite complicated though, as it may depend on how much you hope to save on regular pricing and how you prefer to shop.
Here we are going to take a closer look at mattress shopping today and how to determine the best time of year for you – as a person with your own unique needs, preferences, and budget – to buy a new mattress.
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When Should You Replace Your Mattress?
Before getting into when is the best time of year to buy a mattress let’s look at when you might need to trade up your old model for something new in general.
If you look at most mattress manufacturers’ websites, they will often recommend that a mattress should be replaced every seven to ten years. What you need to know though – and even the manufacturers admit this – is that this is a very rough guideline, and how long a mattress’ true useful life is may be rather different for yours.
How can you tell if your mattress needs replacing?
Here are some tell-tale signs to watch for:
Sagging
A mattress that is beginning to sag is one that almost certainly has very little of its useful life left. Spring mattresses can be particularly prone to ‘premature sag’, although that disadvantage is often negated in a ‘hybrid’ mattress that also makes use of memory foam to (literally) lighten the load on the springs.
The Spine Align Luxury Hybrid mattress provides spinal alignment, superior support and ideal comfort while you sleep. It’s available in three firmness levels and is doctor-design approved and certified by a chiropractor.
Click here to see this hybrid mattress on SpineAlign
It should be noted that eventually almost every mattress will sag, even a very expensive one. After all, the chances are that you – or maybe you and your partner – sleep on it every night, often in almost the exact same spot. The wear and tear that results in sagging is pretty much inevitable.
As a sagging mattress can no longer provide the support it’s supposed to – and your body needs – even if you take temporary measures – like rotating the mattress or adding a foam mattress topper – you should start looking at sales and planning to buy a new mattress very soon once yours starts to lose its ‘bounce’ and sags.
Indentations and Lumps
As we noted, most people sleep in almost the same spot, every night. Eventually this will cause indentations in the mattress, usually corresponding to the spots where your body makes the heaviest contact with the mattress. You will know it is time to start thinking about buying a new mattress when these indentations stop ‘springing back’ when you get up, or when the mattress starts to feel lumpy and bumpy.
Noise
Is your mattress getting noisy? As in, it squeaks when you move, and you have already checked that the bed frame is not to blame? If so, then that is another sign that it needs to be replaced sooner rather than later.
Motion Transfer
You may see the phrase motion transfer in lots of bedding ads, including for mattresses and mattress toppers and not be quite sure what that means. Essentially it means that when you move, your sleeping partner feels it too, often resulting a poor night’s sleep for both of you.
Again, it is traditional innerspring mattresses that are most likely to produce enough motion transfer to disturb your sleep, and that can even be true if it is relatively new.
Back Pain
Waking up with back pain happens to a lot of us. Some of us put it down to increasing age, or having ‘slept funny’, but a lot of the time it is simply because our mattress no longer provides – or may never did provide – the back support needed to prevent waking pain.
Investing in a new mattress – like the excellent SpineAlign– that is specifically designed to help prevent back pain – is something to consider as soon as possible if you want to wake up with a spring in your step rather than pain in your back.
Why Should You Replace Your Mattress?
As you can now see, replacing your mattress may solve a lot of pain problems, and end arguments between couples over who moves around too much when you sleep. But there other reasons to replace your mattress too.
Older mattresses tend to hold onto dust and dirt, and this can lead to lots of coughs and sneezes, even if you do not normally consider yourself a person susceptible to allergies. It can, if it gets really grimy, sometimes lead to itchy skin rashes too, even with sheets on top.
Sometimes a mattress topper can help – this Superior Hypoallergenic Mattress Topper is a good one – to reduce allergies and even back pain – but that is really a temporary measure and a new mattress should probably still go on your shopping list!
Click here to see this product on Amazon
Is Black Friday and Cyber Monday the Best Time of the Year to Buy a Mattress?
The number of sales that retailers offer these days seems to increase all the time, and the names they go by are all, for many, starting to blur together. However, Black Friday is still a term that most of us associate with huge savings, and the ‘online alternative’ – Cyber Monday – is starting to do the same.
Are these the best sale days to buy a mattress? Possibly not. The substantial savings offered on these days are usually applied to things suitable to holiday gifting, or really big ticket electronics – and not really to mattresses, as they would be a rather strange gift to try to have Santa put under someone’s Christmas tree.
By all means check the circulars and online listings on these days for mattress deals, but do not be too surprised if you do not find any huge savings.
Is Memorial Day Weekend the Best Time of the Year to Buy A Mattress Set?
Memorial Day was, for years, associated with big bedding sales at department stores and mattress outlets. To most Americans, Memorial Day marks the end of summer – even though summer does not really end, according to the calendar – until September 22 – and so, to help people get ready for the fall and winter and getting cozy at home, marketers thought it a wonderful time for bedding sales!
You can still find some excellent Memorial Day mattress sales at big department stores like Macy’s, but as these bricks and mortar stores are dwindling in number this may only be a great time of year to buy a mattress if you live in a big city.
Other Notable Holidays That Run Deals on Mattresses
As we mentioned earlier, more and more ‘themed’ sales seem to pop up all the time, and any one of them might offer great mattress deals, it will be a matter of checking promotional emails and circulars to find them. Presidents’ Day and Martin Luther King Day, as both are in late winter, sometimes brings good mattress sales.
Amazon Prime Day is, of course, not an official holiday, but people are getting used to shopping like its one. You can, as you might expect, sometimes score some great mattress deals on Amazon on Prime Day and you should also check other online retailers, as many take advantage of the shopping momentum Prime Day generates to offer big sales of their own.
Best Online Retailers That Run Great Deals
So, you have been tossing and turning on a lumpy mattress and you know that replacing it as soon as possible is a must, for the sake of both your body and your sanity (a lack of sleep can make you very cranky and it is also very unhealthy) You need to buy a new mattress now, but there is not a holiday on the calendar for weeks and Prime Day is months away too.
The good news is that some of the best mattress brands offer great deals throughout the year, so you can get some excellent pricing on the new mattress you need at any time of year. Some of the brands we love most do this – Nectar, PlushBeds and Nolah spring to mind first – and so you can score a good deal on the new mattress at any time of year with some careful shopping!
Next Read: How To Fix a Squeaky Bed