Have you ever wondered what stores do with goods dissatisfied customers return for a refund? Not foods with expired best-before-dates, but purchases such as a tape recorder with control pedals snipped from a recycled sardine can lid or $3 scissors whose blades display more antipathy toward each other than cellmates of rival drug gangs.
Appliances, tools and other inedible products can probably be wiped clean of fingerprints and other smudges, and repackaged for resale. Any inferior product that came in a bubble package or protected by contoured styrofoam can be expected to return to the store with electrical cord dangling from one corner of its carton and excess styrofoam taped to the lid.
Do these refunded purchases wind up in a backroom storage space where some minimum wage associate uniquely motivated by obsessive compulsive disorder takes on the challenge of fitting everything neatly back into its original carton, each cord coiled into a three inch figure-of-eight, twist-tied, and each hunk of styrofoam cuddling a corresponding curve of the product?
I always feel sorry, even guilty, when I must return something that failed to perform or live up to its billing, but I never realized the possible full implications until I heard a TV ad for Octaspring mattresses.
Octaspring Mattress, a United Kingdom manufacturer, advertises a money back guarantee for its expensive product: “60 night risk-free trial. We want you to have every possible chance to have that quality night’s sleep you deserve – that’s why we offer you a 60 night risk-free trial. Sitting on a bed for five minutes in a shop doesn’t tell you very much about a mattress – the only true test is sleeping on it night after night in your own home: And this is what we offer. No quibbles. No fuss.
“We promise if you aren’t getting the best night’s sleep you’ve ever experienced just tell us ....”
So, on the chance one of these fine mattresses fails to satisfy, what happens to the mattress once it’s returned to the store? Is it cleaned, vacuumed, steamed, fumigated and then re-packaged in a fresh plastic bag to be sold as new? What if there are smudges on it from improper handling by dirty fingers? The company claims their mattresses are handled by white gloves, and that may be company policy, but what if the policy isn’t followed on every delivery?
Are less-than-pristine returned mattresses sent to a secondary outlet and sold as gently used?
To allow a mattress to go into someone’s home for any length of time, but particularly 60 days, and then be brought back to the store for resale perturbs me given the prevalence of bedbugs in even the cleanest, best establishments today. Five star hotels, modest but clean motels, and hospitals battle periodic bedbug infestations despite rigorous extermination treatments. Even the stacks in the Vancouver Public Library harbour bedbugs but because the bloodsuckers don’t transmit disease, only an itch for reading, Vancouver Health isn’t too concerned about literary bedbugs.
Without some reliable form of vigorous fumigation or steaming to kill any potential bedbugs, a money back guarantee looks to me like a recipe for trouble.
Bedbugs can be hard to detect anywhere and mattresses, particularly their circumferential bindings and zippers, provide a veritable Indy Speedway for these pests.
These mattresses are made from memory foam, not of itself a food source for bedbugs, except that’s where they hide, “sniffing for the sweet stream of your exhaled carbon dioxide and for your warm skin to grow still,” reports Dr. Johnathan M. Sheele from the Eastern Virginia Medical School.