Sleep Number Didn’t Add Up

My husband and I have very different sleep needs and we both have super sore bodies. This is how we ended up deciding on a split king with an adjustable base. A split king is two twin XLs side by side to make a king. We explored several options but still couldn’t agree on mattresses. He needs a soft bed and I prefer a firm bed, but with a split king you also have to get mattresses of the same depth, otherwise one side is higher and this both looks funny and feels funny. (I know this to be true because that is our current situation.) For all the reasons stated above, we ended up at Sleep Number. Sleep number stores make it easy to find the right bed for you and their air bed system allowed us to adjust the firmness of the mattresses while still maintaining the same mattress depth. Of course, because of my husbands’s need for maximum softness and comfort, we ended up with the highest end model, the i10 360 Smart Bed with the FlexFit 3 base. We even splurged on the foot warmer model, imagining that we’d have the perfect bed for at least 10 years.

Right away, once our bed was delivered and assembled, it did not feel like the same bed as the bed in the store. It simply felt like sleeping on an air mattress, not the luxury bed I had experienced in the store. We followed all the instructions and gave it time, adjusted our settings, and gave it more time. We so much wanted our $10,000 bed to be our dream bed we had imagined it to be. 

Eventually, I went back to the store, where the customer service had been excellent, to check out the bed again and see if I was just imagining things. Almost to my surprise, the bed in the store still felt a thousand times better than my supposedly identical bed at home. The employees at the store were concerned and sympathetic; they told me to call the Sleep Number Customer Service and troubleshoot with tech support. They even gave me a follow up call later to see how it was going. 

Still surprised that the bed in the store felt so different, I sent my husband back to see what he thought. He was also shocked to find that the bed in the store was indeed much more comfortable than our bed. Sleep Number beds are made of components that are assembled in your home and you can see the components if you unzip your mattress cover. He started wondering if our bed was assembled incorrectly, so with the help of the store associate he unzipped the bed at our local Sleep Number and took a picture to compare to our bed. What we found was that the color of our top foam was different than the one in the store. We relayed this information to Customer Service, but they said that the foam colors can vary and that the bed in-store might be more comfortable because it had been used more than our new bed.

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Sleep Number tried to make it right by sending us two twin toppers at no cost to us. This solution made me more comfortable, but ironically, not my husband. He ended up taking his topper off, making our beds different heights, but the worst part was that the $1000 foot warming feature did not work through the topper.

Having had several fitness/sleep trackers I was less than impressed with the smart bed technology and the app (for example, if you are in bed it designates you as sleeping, albeit poorly, even if you are reading and there is no way to tell it when you actually go to sleep, so the data is skewed). Also, my husband’s side had a little rip in the mattress cover from day one, but those were the least of my complaints. In the end, we decided to return the bed because for that much money we expected a lot more.  

I had been forewarned by the Sales Associate in the store that the base was non-refundable. I actually really liked the base, (the mattress is attached to the base via magnets so the bed does not slip around when elevated), but I didn’t want to keep it because the (ingenious) magnet system is proprietary. I was able to negotiate with Customer Service to let us return the base under the circumstances of our experience. They allowed us to return the base minus a $500 re-stock fee and the $199 delivery fee. Sometimes, when I think about it, I’m still a little miffed about that $699 loss, I would have been more satisfied had I only lost the delivery fee, but then I remind myself that I had been fairly warned. 

I am sure that many people are very happy with their Sleep Number beds, and I have friends who certainly are, but all in all, Sleep Number didn’t add up for us. If we had actually received the same bed that we tried out in the store, we probably would have been quite satisfied customers.

The Good: Excellent Sales Associates who were patient with my children and knowledgeable about the products, polite delivery people, the foot warmer option, and the design of the FlexFit 3 base.

The Bad: The discrepancy between the comfort of the mattress from the showroom to comfort of the mattress we received, the high price point, the actual cost of the 100 day trial period, and the ineffectiveness of the Smart Bed sleep tracking capabilities.

Jess My 2 Cents

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