Mattress ads, often featuring the smiling owners of mattress stores (even weirder than car dealers, who also like to appear in their own ads), are saturating television, newspapers, and billboards (above). Why so many mattress ads? I thought a mattress was one of those products you could count on to last for years. My parents slept on the same mattress for their entire adult lives. All right, that's probably not something the family should be sharing on the internet, but the point is, if advertising is any indication, people are replacing their mattresses frequently nowadays. Why?

Are people damaging their mattresses by stuffing them with money, because they don’t trust banks anymore?

Are today’s mattresses wearing out because people aren’t? They’re living longer? (The U.S. has climbed to 30th in the world in life expectancy!)

And what about Viagra and other such drugs to enhance sex? Is that leading to mattress abuse by the aged?

Maybe the problem is with the quality of today’s mattresses. Are they just not making them like they used to? Are we sleeping on cheap ripoffs, literally, hand-stitched together by children in foreign sweatshops? What has happened to America’s historic and world-class mattress industry? Are all the factories in receivership, like the ones that used to manufacture steel, shoes, clothing, and TVs?

And the scary thing is that with so many people discovering that their pay doesn’t go far anymore, since inflation is really a lot higher than the government says it is, and then having their hours reduced and their benefit deductions increased, and with lots of people getting laid off and going without pay and benefits altogether…well, it’s understandable that they are looking for good deals on replacements for their tattered and shoddy imported mattresses.

So they they give in to those oddball but strangely persuasive mattress store owners and buy a succession of mattresses, each inferior to the previous one, each requiring replacement in fewer months, as they are foreclosed and evicted and find themselves living in ever-smaller apartments, motor homes, camper shells, and tents.

Finally, living in abandoned warehouses or under bridges down by the river, they smile toothlessly as they note an irony. The cardboard boxes used to ship mattresses make pretty good mattresses.

[This is an update of one of my truthalyzer.com classic posts.]