Sleep Number

I was watching TV the other day, and I saw a commercial for the Sleep Number bed. It’s a commercial I’ve seen hundreds of times, but something struck me about the product that hadn’t struck me before. It is an incredibly odd way of going about making a personalized bed. The entire selling point of a sleep number bed is that you can customize it to your liking, so it won’t be either too firm or too soft. To do this, you press a little button which either inflates or deflates your mattress. All of this technology is built into the bed you buy.

I wonder how often people change their settings. I can’t imagine just picking a random number each night, just to spice things up. I imagine most people find something that’s comfortable for them, and stick with it – identifying with their ‘sleep number’ as they do in the commercials. So that means the technology required to get the bed to the appropriate setting is used exactly once. That first day (or two) a person is getting used to the bed, inflating and deflating, trying to get it just right, and then never touching it again.

It seems to me that someone could make a killing by undercutting the price of the Sleep Number bed and centralizing all of that technology. Or maybe it’s just cheap enough that it doesn’t even matter. But it struck me as an odd way of selling something. Sort of like buying the largest belt available because you know it will be able to fit just right, even if there is a lot of excess hanging off.