Select Comfort 5000 Sleep Number Bed What I Wish I Had Known BEFORE Purchasing! Select Comfort Mattress Sleep Number 5000
We love this bed Select Comfort Mattress Sleep Number 5000 It is interesting to note how many people hate this bed and think it is an overpriced waste. I have o...
Select Comfort 3000 Select Comfort Sleep Number Bed 3000 Series Several Months ago my wife and I purchased the SC 3000 bed after trying them out in a mall showroom. ...
If only I had known what a hassle (and how expensive) it would be to “try” this bed for 30 days, I would never have done it (and I went the cheapest way possible…setting it up myself and taking it down, stuffing it back into the original boxes, and shipping it back to Select Comfort…it COULD have cost much more)!!
Because my daughter and her husband LOVE their California King Select Comfort 5000 bed, I finally convinced myself to try this product. I had been toying with the idea for more than five years, because I had never been happy with my Sealy Posturepedic Mattress…it was top of their line and very expensive, but just WAY too firm for me! The nearly $2000 price tag for the queen-sized Select Comfort 5000 gave me pause, but I REALLY longed for a comfortable night’s sleep. All the promises the Select Comfort material made were so alluring…I bit the bullet and ordered one. I decided to set it up myself to save the $149 set-up fee…I am relatively handy, so I figured the money would be better spent on accessories like a new mattress pad and pillow (more on that later).
The decision to set the bed up myself was a good one. It really isn’t that hard to put together. The instructions are very clear, and the components are well-packaged and easy to find. The only thing I needed help with was moving the old mattress and box spring out of the bedroom. My husband helped with that…we piled them on top of the queen-sized bed in the guest room…it looked like a set from the “Princess and the Pea”! If you have the Select Comfort set-up crew come out, they do offer to remove the old mattress and box-spring, but that really would make it hard if you decide not to keep their bed (by design, do you think?).
The box spring is pretty cheesy…plastic (think Tyco)…ours was a bit warped, so it was a challenge to get it together properly. When one part was straight, the opposite side would pop up. If the platform pieces had been straight, it would have gone together quite easily. If you put a board on top of your old box spring…or if you have a platform bed…you have no need for this part of the set. They do provide a quilted fabric cover to help disguise the cheap plastic.
The mattress goes together very easily. The pillow-top cover is nice-looking. I liked being able to see how the bed was constructed. The mattress components seemed much nicer than the box spring, but there is no getting around the fact that the air chambers bear a remarkable resemblance to ordinary air mattresses. On the queen-sized bed, the air chambers are a mere 24 inches wide…which contributed to my dissatisfaction with this product, I’m sure. A wide, firm strip of foam (about 4-5 inches wide) runs along both sides of the bed and along the top and bottom. A narrower strip of foam runs down the center of the bed between the two air chambers. This leaves a pretty skimpy sleeping area for each occupant.
The total set-up time was about 1 1/2 hours…and that included a lot of wrestling with the warped plastic frame. The $149 savings was not a bad hourly wage! (I also got the bed much sooner than I would have if I had purchased the set-up service, since it was delivered to my home by UPS four days after I ordered it.) One thing I was concerned about was the way UPS left the 4 boxes on my front porch without signature…for a $2000 purchase???
I piled the four huge boxes on top of the doubled up bedroom set in the guest room and the whole thing almost reached the ceiling! No visitors for thirty days!!
I was really excited about trying my new bed! I was tired, too, after putting it together, so I looked forward to the glorious comfort promised in the brochure. Wrong. When I awoke the next morning, I felt like I had been beaten! With my “Sleep Number” of 35, getting up was like climbing out of a hole…and the bed looked like a partially deflated air mattress when I got out. The foam side rail made it really difficult to crawl out of bed. I tried to “get used to” the feel of the bed, the way Select Comfort advises; I tried to adjust the setting; I tried to love this $2000 bed; but by week three, it was clear to my husband and me that we would rather have our $2000 back!
When I called Select Comfort to arrange a return, they tried to offer me an additional 30-days on my “free” trial, and told me that it takes some time to get used to the bed. I gently but firmly told them that I was not interested in extending the trial, and they did set up a date to come pick up the bed. My husband and I figured that even though the home pick-up cost $200, it would be worth it not to have to try to get the bed re-packaged and sent back ourselves since the return shipping charges alone amounted to $130+. The first date they said they could pick up the bed was more than 2 weeks from the time I made my call. When I expressed disappointment, they moved it up to a date 10 days off, but could not give me a pick-up time. When they called with a pick-up time (four-hour range, not an exact time) two days before the scheduled pick-up, it was a time I could not take off work. They would not work with me to pick it up later in the day, but they gave me another pick-up date that was another two weeks off…and again with no guaranteed pick up time. When I hung up, I was in tears. I did not want to spend another 2 weeks on this horrible bed!
I decided to go ahead and try to dismantle the bed and re-package it myself. It was not as hard as I had imagined. The foam layers certainly took up more space than they had when shrink-wrapped, but I managed to get them into the boxes and get them closed. It took almost a whole roll of packing tape to seal (and reconstruct) those original boxes, but I was VERY motivated…I did not want to spend another miserable night on the Select Comfort 5000!!
I called the Service Department and cancelled the home pick up and asked to have return shipping labels sent. The four labels were $29.99 each, and UPS charged an additional pick-up fee of $10.35, but there was no way I could get these four huge boxes to a UPS drop off location just to save the $10.35! UPS promised pick up the next day, but they would not give me a time, though they did say I could just leave the boxes on the porch. My husband and I did not feel comfortable leaving such an expensive item on the porch and hope that it was picked up properly, so he arranged to take a day off work to baby sit with the packages. As it turned out, that was a waste, because UPS did not pick up until almost 5:00 p.m., and by that time I was already home from school. (If we had only known!!)
Bottom line…it cost us $130.31 and a day’s pay to try this bed for thirty days for “free”, and we got off as cheaply as possible! If we had had home delivery and pick-up, it would have been $349 just to try it (and TWO days of work lost!!).
We also got stuck with an over-priced mattress pad and pillow which are not returnable. I got caught up in the promise of “20% off accessories that you purchase the day you order your bed”…I just wasn’t thinking clearly. I could have purchased comparable items from Wal-Mart or Costco for much less money, and they would have been returnable….So there’s another $138 that the Select Comfort experience cost us (although we do have the mattress pad and pillow, and they are nice).
If you can try the Select Comfort bed (in the size you plan to order) for a full night, do it! The in-store experience is just not the same as trying to sleep on the thing! See if a local hotel has Select Comfort beds, swap houses with your neighbors or in-laws…do whatever it takes! It may save you a lot of problems if you find, as we did, that this bed is NOT for you!
Happy ending: I found that by using a combination memory foam/polyfil mattress topper (in a quilted, zippered case) that I bought at Costco for around $150, I was able to make my overly firm mattress much more comfortable…I only wish that I had discovered this solution before going through the Select Comfort experience!
UPDATE: Although I cancelled the home pick-up with the Select Comfort customer service department and sent the bed back with return shipping labels (that I was charged for), Select Comfort failed to remove the $200 charge for home pick-up from my account. When I finally got the credit for our return, it was $200 short. I called customer service, and they claimed that I had not been charged for home pick-up. They finally “found” the $200 shortage and credited my account, but had I not questioned it, I could have paid them an additional $200! Just the icing on the Select Comfort cake!!
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