There is a mattress store in your town. There has always been a mattress store in your town. You have never seen anyone inside it.
Think about that. Think about how long that store has been there. Think about the lease. The employees — there are employees, standing in there right now between mattresses, waiting. The electricity bill for all those lights. The cost of the mattresses themselves, staged at angles, tagged with prices that start at $800 and go somewhere you don’t want to look. All of that overhead. All of that square footage. All of that waiting.
And you have never, not once, seen a transaction occur.
Here is why the mattress store exists and here is why your brain cannot process it: you buy a mattress approximately FIVE TIMES in your entire adult life. Five. Maybe six if you go through a divorce and have to start over, which is already a bad day without also having to go to a mattress store. The average mattress lasts eight to ten years. You buy one, you forget you bought it, you sleep on it until something goes wrong, and then you are in the mattress store again, blinking under fluorescent lights, being asked about your sleep position by a stranger.
This is not a business model. This is a patience game.
The mattress store does not need foot traffic. It does not need the Saturday rush. It does not need you to browse and impulse buy a mattress the way you impulse buy something at Target. It needs approximately THREE PEOPLE PER WEEK to come in and spend $1,200 each and the lights stay on. That’s it. That is the entire math. Three people. Per week. In a store that appears completely abandoned at all times.
And people DO come in. You just never see them because you are not in the mattress store. You are outside the mattress store, driving past it, assuming it’s a front for something. It is not a front for something. It is a store that sells mattresses and it is thriving on a schedule you cannot perceive.
The mattress store exists in a time scale that is simply different from yours. It is patient in the way that geological formations are patient. It opened. It will not close. It does not need you today. It will need you eventually. It knows this. It is waiting.
I have thought about this more than is healthy. I’ve driven past the same location — Sleep Train, then Mattress Firm, they absorbed Sleep Train, they absorb everyone — for eleven years. I have never seen a car in the lot. The store is still there. The store will always be there.
The mattress store is not failing. The mattress store has figured something out about time and need and inevitability that most businesses never crack. You will need a mattress. The store will be there when you do. It has nowhere to be.
Go ahead and drive past it. It doesn’t mind. It’s got a California King with your name on it and all the time in the world.