Unintended Perk of the Online Mattress Boom: Never-Ending Free Trials

Dozens of bedding venders such as Casper and Tuft & Needle offer generous return policies. Life hackers are taking advantage. From a report: Over the course of 15 months, Mr. Bir slept on five different mattresses, each one purchased and returned consecutively using the free-trial policies of dozens of bed-in-a-box startups. It all began in 2016, when Mr. Bir, a new arrival to New York City, was uncertain about how long he would stay, and in need of a cheap short-term sleeping surface. “I didn’t have the intention of churning through so many,” said Mr. Bir, 31, a technical architect at Slack Technologies. What began as a makeshift solution soon grew into an elaborate scheme, calculated to stretch the trials as far as they would go. “You could literally do this and never pay for a mattress,” he realized. Online mattress sales are booming in the U.S. The success of direct-to-consumer services like Casper Sleep Inc. and Tuft & Needle, which deliver neatly boxed mattresses to consumers’ doors, has spawned hundreds of copycats. To entice shoppers who would otherwise prefer to test the firmness of the mattress in the showroom, many of these online upstarts offer free home trials that can run for as long as a year. The customer typically pays for the mattress up front and gets a full refund if the mattress is returned before the cutoff. For consumers like Mr. Bir, the implications were obvious: a virtually limitless supply of brand-new mattresses that, other than one’s dignity, cost nothing — that is, as long as they remember to return the mattresses in time. That’s the rub. Two years ago, Lily Liu-Krason, a 26-year-old data scientist living in New York, found herself overwhelmed by the sheer number of mattress options available to her, so she followed a colleague’s suggestion that she sign up for several of the free trials. Ms. Liu-Krason splurged on Casper’s $149 same-day delivery and installation service, thinking that she would return her roughly $800 mattress before the 100-night free trial period ended, at which point she would start a free trial with another mattress maker.