In recent years, the high-margin world of mattress shops has been heavily disrupted by mail-order alternatives. To get customers to buy vacuum-shrunk mattresses they haven't seen, let alone bounced on, these companies have generous return policies. But what happens to these big, heavy, unmailable items when someone comes to pick them up?
Maggie Koerth (formerly at Boing Boing) explains over at FiveThirtyEight.
At the other end of those eerily identical ads I found a single seller — an independent agent for a new kind of company that's aiming to solve the mattress companies' problems and reduce landfill waste. Called Sharetown, it works kind of like Uber and Lyft: A mattress company contracts with Sharetown to handle returns and, when one pops up, Sharetown connects the customer with an nearby agent who takes the mattress off their hands, cleans it up, and markets it for sale on local community sites like Facebook and Craigslist. When the mattress sells, everybody gets a cut — the agent, Sharetown and the company that originally sold the mattress.
