It reminds me of all the Uber and Airbnb clones that didn't recognize that the primary features that created their success was the commoditized nature of the seller and the ability to tap into latent supply (and circumventing the established regulatory environment, but that is a conversation for another time).

An Uber for home cleaning was never going to work because it is tough to commoditize inviting someone into your home and both the cleaner and the user have an incentive to cut out the middle man as soon as a solid working relationship is established.

An Airbnb for massage therapists was never going to work because there isn't a huge supply of people who are capable of providing the service but are unable to find customers themselves.

An Uber for delivering food works because no one cares who delivers the food and because it is a service that almost anyone can perform.

> An Uber for home cleaning was never going to work because it is tough to commoditize inviting someone into your home and both the cleaner and the user have an incentive to cut out the middle man as soon as a solid working relationship is established.

Eh, I've started using Helpling in Singapore (on-demand home cleaning service) that seems to be quite stable/successful.

Of course, I doubt they're Uber-scale profitable, and I don't know how much capital they're burning (if any), but there definitely seems to be business value there.

> Uber-scale profitable

That's an oxymoron, Uber are massively loss making.

You're right, I misspoke. I should have said "Uber-valuable".

They're still hemorrhaging money, no?

There is a massage on demand service. In fact, there are a lot of businesses that fill the small niches. They are not and will never be Unicorns, but they are solid businesses. For example: Soothe is an app for on demand massage service. Works great.

So, once you find someone you like, why not just contract off-app?

We use Rover all the time and usually use the same dogsitter. I don't move off app because the money I'm spending isn't enough to try and get a discount ($25 for a night out with the wife, $60 or 70 a day if we go out of town). Plus they offer pet insurance and some other protections that are worth it.

I use Rover all the time, we have had a number of dog sitters offer themselves as a personal dog sitter off the Rover app for a small discount.

We always politely decline because of the layer of perceived security Rover offers with their insurance.

I've offered to pay the person who watches my dog directly, and she declines exactly because of the value add of Rover insuring her. Seems a fair model.

I thought it was fair until I found out they were taking something like 20% from the sitter on top of charging me a service fee of 5% or so.

This conversation actually made me curious what the actual value of that insurance is.

According to this source, at retail prices dog walking insurance costs 500$ a year for comprehensive coverage, or about 40$ a month: https://www.petsits.com/petsittinginsuranceusa

Rover takes almost 40$ in service fees for one weekend of boarding my single dog!

I appreciate the value of insurance, I kind of appreciate the Craigslist+ role they serve, but at the point where more than 25% of my payment is never making it to the sitter... Rover is just burning my money to fund a bloated payroll and lofty valuations

Doesnt bother me in the slightest. Sitters seem happy and protected, I'm happy and protected, the vendor makes what they can. Not everything needs to be a fight against the injustice of middle-men.

Can you not insure yourself, or insure yourself against someone else?

Businesses can often broker discounted group policies which are a fraction of the cost of what an individual policy costs(e.g. health insurance).

Sure, but Rover is presumably benefiting from a much better economy of scale and bargaining position (since it's buying for however many thousands or millions of users it has), whereas you are unlikely to be able to do the same as an individual.

Yes but at that point and for the price it's a convenience/time thing. I probably spend 250 or 300 a month on dog sitting through Rover. The time it would take for me to find a way to self insur is worth considerably more to me than 300.

We also use Rover because they have insurance that allows the dog sitter to take your pet to the vet and pay the vet for services without you having to be there in person.

I would argue that there are many incentives to use platforms/apps for both the client and the provider/host, instead of contracting off-platform/off-app. For the provider, the app gives them 1) a steady stream of new leads and 2) it allows them to build up a reputation on the platform for repeat business. Maybe it is sometimes a bad sign to contract off-platform, because it could signal that they are not trustworthy enough, or do not have a high enough service quality and so would not have a high rating if they were on the platform? Also as the other user said: platforms often offer mediation/dispute resolution and insurance.

Platforms offer a way for individuals or small businesses to get started in a new sector without doing a lot of marketing for themselves. It's a bit like being part of an alliance.

I am not arguing for the continued domination and rent-seeking practices of Silicon Valley middle-men corporations. I'm arguing that the existence of any online bazaar/marketplace and the ability to search and compare, makes for excellent dynamics.

To go even further, I advocate for an emerging alternative that has been termed 'Protocol Cooperativism':

Instead of monopolistic rent-seeking platforms, it focuses on open source economic protocols that allow full negotiation between peer to peer users. Check out Ceptr.org, MetaCurrency and Holochain. It provides the frame and framework for ever evolving protocols (comprehensive versioning tech).

You can, but they are not always available and it takes some time to find the perfect fit. I like the fact that the price is the same yet there are rules and options if you need a change or the practitioner cancels. Same with Rover.

It surprises me that nobody's mentioned Fiverr in the same vein.

I'd think "an Uber for creative work" is at least prone to the same incentives to cut out the middleman.

The digital nature of the work means the market is global, unlike home cleaning or massages, making a matching system more valuable.

I have never personally used Fiverr. How easy is it to get in contact with each other outside of the Fiverr ecosystem? That is a natural outcome of all the other examples in which there is some contact between provider and customer in the physical world. With Fiverr everything occurs digitally so it is probably easier to prevent people from circumventing the app.

Super easy. You have to share documents and designs. Almost all of those design sharing systems allow messaging. Or you know google docs and invite them to read shows you the email.

There's really no way for them to stop it. It's all just about if they want to deal with invoicing and other stuff themselves or go direct. Many don't want to bother. But every wall they throw up makes it more likely people will jump off after that initial aquisition.

But many of these jobs ARE just one shots. Tho I usually go back to the same folks who did good work and communicated well with later tasks.

Agreed - I like fiverr over hiring direct because I don’t really want to be in someone’s rolodex as a customer they are going to call and pester. As for maids, I feel the problem there is you rarely get anyone who is going to do more than feather dust your home. So a “service” isn’t going to radically improve that. As for glasses I really want to like WP but their plastic frames really are subpar. It’s a far better experience to buy off the rack at Costco if cheap is what you’re seeking. For years I would spend $600/year buying zero G from a small boutique until I decided maybe instead I should have five pairs of WP... so I tried that and every single one of them had something I didn’t like.. so one day I found myself in Costco and decided to give that a go and have never looked back. Heh that’s probably indicator #641 I’m turning into an old fart.

I buy glasses from Zenni and I've always been happy. Although Sam's club has brought their prices down to be more competitive. I'm seeing more things included that used to be extra.

Which is probably okay, in the same sense that companies and temporary workers (or workers otherwise sourced through a staffing agency) will "cut out the middleman" (in this case, the staffing agency) and transition to permanent direct-hire employment after a certain period (assuming said temporary worker has demonstrated oneself to be valuable enough to be worth keeping on).

In the case of creative work, it's arguably less hassle to let Fiverr handle things than to sign into a bunch of one-off contracts, and reserve "cut[ting] out the middleman" for cases where someone has consistently delivered work to your standards (or, on the other side, has consistently paid well) and there's a desire to make for a more long-term arrangement than one-off jobs.

It would be interesting if a delivery service curated a customer list in the same way that housekeepers do

People eat carryout often - sometimes every meal/dinner. Just pitch the service as "call Ma for dinner" or somesuch

Mattresses were a notoriously opaque and user-hostile market. A decade ago I was working at a startup aimed at helping people make better purchasing decisions, and that was one of the top categories people mentioned struggling with.

Things are at least a little better now, in that at least the DTC companies have a clear set of options that get sold at reasonably clear price points.

> Mattresses were a notoriously opaque and user-hostile market. A decade ago I was working at a startup aimed at helping people make better purchasing decisions, and that was one of the top categories people mentioned struggling with.

I've found that one of the most time-efficient heuristics for getting a quality product for these product categories is simply "buy whatever Costco is selling".

And Costco can leverage that by selling mattresses for $50 more than you'd spend somewhere else. Ikea does the same thing. I'm a stupid vaper and trying to piece together a kit based off reviews by the kinds of people who vape is incredibly tedious. There's value in not having to guess.

> And Costco can leverage that by selling mattresses for $50 more than you'd spend somewhere else

Costco explicitly commits to never making more than 12% on anything they sell. It’s a major part of their brand and part of the reason people trust them.

Where is this commitment? I am not able to find it and I am reasonably certain that Costco has a much larger margin than 12% on many of their products.

If anything, that sounds like an average, which doesn't tell you anything as they could be screwing you on mattresses while losing money on hot dogs and rotisserie chickens to even it out to a 12% gross margin.

It’s mentioned quite often in their financial filings but I don’t have an example handy and I don’t feel like digging through a 10K right now. However, here is an Esquire article that mentions it:

“Costco has stated that the highest margin they will take on a non-Costco brand is 13 percent and they strive to keep it closer to 10 percent.”

https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a35749/costco-the-...

I'm with the other comments: where do they say they cap at 12%? Costco brings a lot of value to the consumer, IMO, but I feel like that's deliberately shooting themselves in the foot.

And why the arbitrary 12%? Why not 15 or 21?

Costco is often cheaper than other retailers and on sale can be much cheaper. I grabbed a Casper king for 680$, way under the Casper list price even with coupons.

I didn’t like it and I returned it without issue.

Ikea is NOT selling mattresses at $50 above what other places charge. Compare materials, coil count, thickness, etc. -- plus return policy. Ikea mattresses are a huge bargain compared to similar mattresses from any major brand such as Sealy, Serta, etc. Can't speak to the online mattress sellers.

Ever go to a mattress store? Never seen a $3000 mattress before but that was the cheapest model they had. It has to be a front right? This place is a minor chain in town.

Throw on some cheaper looking clothes and try again.

> Things are at least a little better now, in that at least the DTC companies have a clear set of options that get sold at reasonably clear price points.

Although I agree with your statement, no one tried to solve the actual problem with purchasing a mattress: finding a mattress that fits you well. The process changed from trying many mattresses in a uselessly-short[1] in-store test (with almost no information about what you're buying), to buying a "One size fits most" item for a product where that doesn't actually exist[1] – and without even trying it.

[1]: From "Choosing the Best Mattress: An Experiment in Testing Whether Individuals Choose a Bed That Leads to Improved Sleep," https://www.rti.org/sites/default/files/resources/rr-0016-11... : "The mattress that individuals chose as optimal before the randomized, controlled phase of the study did not predict either the actigraphically determined best mattress or the best mattress as determined by reported sleep quality." Lots more in the paper.

The problem with mattresses is that the DTCs like Casper got started just as the Chinese manufacturers were going "More Direct to Consumer". I can get a Casper-equivalent mattress from a no-name brand like Zinus for hundreds less than a Capser mattress, and the difference just goes to Casper's customer acquisition (i.e. ads + a generous return policy).

Casper basically became the modern version of the opaque mattress store.

https://www.sleeplikethedead.com/bed-mattress-review-home.ht...

I always loved the "sex" part of these ratings. No matter what type of mattress you get, the best sex you'll get is overall a B-.

I'm curious how waterbeds would fare by those criteria, given their reputation in that regard.

I learned a lot about frequencies in a fixed sized medium and standing waves with a waterbed. Also balance and teamwork.

The problem is that your no name Chinese knock off mattress might be flammable.

I won't know or care till it's too late for me to care other than for a gruesome 3 minutes. Carcinogenic on the other hand.

I mean this is the real problem with Amazon right? I think it's the real reason Jeff Bezos says Amazon will go bankrupt.

To me it's the real problem with the American consumer

Umm, Zinus is a South Korean company that was in business well before Casper was, and has a higher market cap. :-)

https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/013890:KS

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that Zinus was lesser than Casper, or didn't come earlier. In fact, I'm fairly certain if we peel back the curtain, most of these American DTC mattress vendors are actually just Zinus under the hood.

I bought a Spa Sensations mattress back in 2010, and that's actually just Walmart's label on a Zinus mattress. (They even call it "Spa Sensations by Zinus" now.) Phenomenal mattress, super cheap, has lasted me forever. I suspect that many of the DTC vendors were doing the same and being a little less overt about it (so they could pocket the markup).

If I had to buy another mattress right now, I'd just buy direct from Zinus, as it looks like they have a reasonable retail presence in the US now.

> Mattresses were a notoriously opaque and user-hostile market

Based on the data, I think we can conclude that opacity and user hostility are insufficient criteria for a DTC play. (Unless consumers are willing to pay a premium for the removal of said opacity and hostility.)

I think it's too early to say. For me the real problem with these companies is VC money seeking VC-sized returns, which often come from getting outsize market power (e.g., the FAANGs).

I think the DTC companies mostly can't build the moats needed to make that kind of money. So I think a reckoning is overdue. But once key players can no longer subsidize each sale, we'll find out for sure where the store-vs-DTC balance is.

My personal guess is that plenty of people will keep buying DTC goods, and that many categories will be more than competitive with brick-and-mortar competitors. So I expect DTC mattresses will be a good business, even if none of the current big players survive the culling.

Opacity and user hostility tends to exist to substantially inflate prices or thwart discounting. Lower prices are sufficient for a DTC entrant to grab share.

Maybe just a little before Casper was founded, I bought a memory foam mattress off of Amazon that was well-reviewed and could be delivered with Prime. It's been a great mattress. That's still an option today -- and at a few hundred dollars cheaper than the main DTCs, I'm not quite sure where they can really provide a ton of additional value.

You have some assurance that you’re buying a consistent product.

Buying a foam mattress on Amazon sounds like inviting some sort of toxic mess of outgassing junk into your bedroom. No thanks.

Yeah I got an "egg crate" mattress topper off of Amazon and had to let that thing sit in my garage for a week before it didn't reek. I can only wonder how much it off gassed after that, but my bedroom has decent ventilation so hopefully I didn't breathe in too many carcinogens.

> Based on the data, I think we can conclude that opacity and user hostility are insufficient criteria for a DTC play.

DTC at a 40% discount from "I can buy it walking into a show room staffed by a dozen salesmen in a Manhattan shopping district" is not enough of a discount. Make a discount 85% of that every damn day and we can talk.

> Mattresses were a notoriously opaque and user-hostile market. A decade ago I was working at a startup aimed at helping people make better purchasing decisions

Who is this startup, and can they help me identify what I love about my current mattress so that when it's done, I can buy one much like it?

Alas, we failed. Our theory was that what people liked best was recommendations from their first- and second-degree network (followed by a few other kinds of information). This worked really well if you had a relatively dense social network in the app. E.g., you could ask your exact question and get back replies from your friends and their friends. Inevitably a few friends and FoaFs would have useful approaches for something as common as mattresses. So toward the end of our seed money we were working hard on network infill and it was looking good. Then Facebook drastically changed the sharing rules, tanking our growth numbers just as we were looking to raise money. RIP and c'est la guerre.

The site I like best these days for purchase decision support is Wirecutter. Here's their mattress guide, which seems sensible to me: https://thewirecutter.com/guides/buying-a-mattress/

Property of the NY times

Yeah and honestly it’s one of the most refreshing things an old-guard newspaper has done. Using journalism chops to actually provide consumers with valuable information that affects their daily lives.

I would love if they stated doing more in-depth pieces about different niche markets.

Yeah, the article put Warby Parker in the title, and talked about all these businesses failing... but didn't really have much to say about what made Warby Parker different, why are they doing so well? You have one theory that seems likely to me, but that seems to be an interesting part of the story!

They make super solid glasses that look and feel just as good as those from top tier "fashionable" brands, but they are much much cheaper.

My personal favorite part is that you don't have to do this mental math of "the frame is this much, then pick lenses you want depending on your budget, etc." The price of the frame is the only thing you pay, all the fancy lenses and such are free, whether you need them or not (in case of sunglasses). With frames being noticeably cheaper than other brands and lenses being free (usually the bulk of the cost of prescription glasses), they are welcome to put their hand in my wallet.

The only reason I don't shop there much anymore is because of LASIK. Back then though, I had about 4 different frames from Warby Parker, and those were my favorites, despite previously wearing the usual "known" eyewear brands (and that's even without factoring in the cost).

P.S. There are some extra charges for lenses in rare scenarios, like if you have a very very strong prescription, they charge you a bit extra if you want to make the lenses thinner. Still not comparable to traditional glass brands though in terms of how much it costs.

P.P.S. There are other affordable online eyewear places, but I have been appalled with the quality and look of those. A couple of friends of mine tried Zenni Optical before, and those frames felt flimsy and they didn't look good at all imo. Warby Parker seems to have found a really solid niche between "cheap and flimsy" and "overpriced brand name eyewear", which is "the quality and looks of premium eyewear, but with a much more reasonable pricing".

Warby Parker's frame selection is limited though. They mostly only have large, heavy plastic frames, and the few wire frames they have are still huge. None of their frames suit my preferences or my prescription.

I prefer smaller, traditional wire frames because that's what I've always worn (and at this stage in life that's unlikely to change). Unfortunately, wire frames seem to be out of fashion and no-one seems to have a good selection.

Furthermore, I have a fairly strong prescription and with my current frames, the lenses are about 8 mm thick at the edges, and my frames are the smallest I could find. The larger the frame, the thicker the lenses end up being. I could go with a higher-index lens material, but then chromatic aberrations become way too distracting, and I'd rather have a thicker lens than deal with that again.

P.S. Those "rare" scenarios you refer to are not that rare. My mother gets her glasses from WP, and they end up costing several hundred Canadian dollars, about the same as Costco. My mother's prescription is also not that strong or unusual; like most or a lot of old people, she is both near-sighted and far-sighted, and while bifocals might be an option, most people seem to prefer transition lenses (I think that's what they're called).

Zenni has a good selection of wire frames. I too prefer them. Large lenses are very big at the edges, since I have a strong RX. Plastic frames always feel like their sliding down my face.

Wish I could find glasses with ear hooks. They only make them for kids now.

I always bend the arms down to hook my ears tighter. I work a lot on my hands and knees (trim carpentry), and there's nothing more annoying than my glasses swinging back and forth on my face.

I have heavy lenses, wish I could find cable-temples for adults.

Any chance you could describe chromatic aberrations? I’ve had some vision frustrations, and I feel like perhaps you’ve just described what I have. So did sticking with the thicker lenses help? Rather than the thinner? (I have a very high prescription as well, and I’ve always had the thinner lenses.)

The aberration I see when I wear glasses are most obvious when looking at something like colored LED lighting - I can actually cleanly separate the red and blue components of a purple light into two separate images, for instance. More blended colors will just get the usual fringe.

That, along with the other severe distortion brought on by a -10 diopter, is why I mainly wear contacts now.

Rainbow fringes around light sources, particularly low-quality LEDs. Aberrations are minimal at the centre of the lens, but progressively get worse toward the edges (which is why contact lenses don't suffer from this problem). Driving at night became a nightmare, especially with LED headlights. I'd see cop cars out of the corner of my eyes everywhere when LED headlights would appear blue and strobe through a centre median. It didn't really bother me that much during the day though. For reference, I have diopters of -8.25 and -9.

I still have high-index lenses, but ones with a lower index of refraction and therefore a higher Abbe number. I don't remember specifically which material I have, but I think it might be high index 1.6 (index of refraction) with an Abbe number of 42. Chromatic aberrations are minimal enough with these lenses that they don't bother me much anymore (although still present).

For comparison, crown glass and CR-39 plastic have Abbe numbers of about 58, but will result in much thicker lenses at stronger prescriptions. Regular high index plastic lenses have the some of the worst Abbe numbers, and the higher index you go the worse it gets (Abbe of 32–36), but lenses can get very thin with high index 1.74. More on this at [2].

I've worn contacts several different times, but not only could I not get used to removing them from my eyes, I didn't like how much they worsened my close-up vision, and you can't just take off contacts like you can glasses.

This[1] comment by @mindslight on HN last year was a big help. In the end, I did have to switch providers when Costco didn't have any other material options (I got my glasses from Zehrs Optical in Canada). I payed about $325 altogether, but there was some sort of deal on so I don't know how it would be normally.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19315769

[2] https://www.2020mag.com/article/does-material-abbe-value-inf...

Mykita. You didn’t mention cheap as a requirement.

I have absolutely no problem with Zenni. The idea that I can get my prescription glasses for under $10 is kind of amazing. I've only broken one pair so far after using them for about a year.

I found a style of frames I really like and now I just keep buying them in different colors so all my lenses are interchangeable.

Warby Parker is using really cheap frames though. (And Zenni is even worse). I stopped buying at both.

At Costco you can try and choose the frame directly and at the end walk away with higher quality glasses for the same price. Same with contact lenses - you can’t buy same brands of contact lenses cheaper even online.

Plenty of companies selling a good product cheap fail though. As the OP mentions, one reason is that customer acquisition can be really expensive regardless.

(A theory certainly could be that customer acquisiton was cheaper when Warby Parker was started and there were fewer direct to consumer businesses, it was more novel).

If the difference between companies that succeeded and failed was just "do they have a good product at a good price" there wouldn't be much to write about!

These days my toughest eyewear challenge is getting an optometrist who's patient enough with my sensitive eyes to actually get the right prescription.

Warby really does have a good deal compared to other glasses options (IMO this wasn't true until they developed bricks and mortar stores to fit the glasses properly). If the only thing a new company is selling is that it's not your parents' brand, then failure seems like a matter of if, not when. Generational advertising can't beat a better, more efficient, or lower cost product.

Mattresses are crazy-overpriced and near-monopolistic, though. Not quite to Luxottica levels, but close. At least before companies like Purple and Casper and so on came along.

I don’t think spring mattresses aren’t as overpriced as you might expect. You can look at the pure cost of springs, foam, fabric/covering, etc... It turns out that buying these things individually, for a minimal queen size mattress made of springs (~1000, pocket coiled) with a foam top (2” latex or synthetic), foam support on the bottom, and not too much edge support (other than tighter springs on the edge) will start to approach $750 or so. Ikea makes cheaper beds but they skimp on the coils and use the cheapest possible foams, but that’s often okay too.

Add $100 for labor and you arrive at a mattress that that is about $900. That’s about the floor for a mattress most people would be happy with.

The 100% foam mattresses are much cheaper (less labor, cheaper materials) and many people are happy with those, but not all.

Casper pay $400 for a mattress as per article (info from S1): “ This appears to be Casper’s business,” tweeted number-crunching Atlantic columnist Derek Thompson. “Buy mattress at $400...”

Or go to IKEA and get a Sultan mattress for $250 any day or $110 when on sale. Oh and they ship, too.

IKEA’s shipping is not cheap though.

Yeah, because Casper mattresses are a solid block of foam. Way cheaper than spring mattresses, all you need is to source foam sheets, cut them, and roll them for shipment. No springs, no fabric, no filler, no construction.

Have you ever seen a Casper mattress?? Everything you say is provably false. Casper mattresses have a few layers of different types of foam, all packaged together in a nice fabric outer layer. If you've ever seen one, they are clearly a non-trivial construction.

It's most definitely not as simple as "cut them, and roll them for shipment."

So you glue the layers and wrap it in a sheet, big deal. Still way less labor and materials than wiring together 300-500 springs and encasing them with layers of pillow filler.

Huh. I got a mattress last year, went to a regular furniture store, got a regular spring mattress, paid under $300. No going out of business sale, no haggling, and I delivered it myself with a rental truck for less than I would have paid to get it in a week.

Yeah I heard that all years before. My SO is significantly smaller and lighter than me and when we moved together here in Germany we went to one of those "always sale"-shops that are all over. The guy talked to us for almost an hour. We tested mattresses and bought one we thought might be good for ~1000€. 2 years later(!), it already felt like it was getting worse, she was rolling on me, we had back pains and a year later we really needed a new one.

Fortunately a mattress seller became famous at the time in Germany for breaking the monopoly here and getting all the hate from the lobby. You know what he did? He sold the same mattresses everybody else sold but significantly cheaper. The margin was just ridiculous.

After being "banned" and not being supplied shortly after he started, he came up with his own mattress. 100€. Just foam. We had it for ~5years now and I never slept so good before. The mattress have been tested as the best mattress on the market for many years here in Germany so it wasn't just us.

I know the US market is different because people seem to value ridiculous sizes and design over health and usability but this is what actually helps this scammy market to rise to those ridiculous prices.

The problem with foam mattresses is that they can contain nasty "fire retardant" chemicals and are a recycling nightmare.

What's the brand from the guy with the good 100 EUR mattresses?

A market where there's attempts to overcharge is not a monopoly. Cheap mattresses aren't a new thing. (I've also never set foot into one of those mattress chains)

Mattresses are an awful business but even worse cliche.

My old school mattress was like $700 and is fine. I’m a huge fan of IKEA, and have bought everything from furniture to a kitchen from them. But their mattresses are garbage.

They're fine if you only need it for a year. I found their $200 Morgedal mattress very comfortable and I slept very well on it, but about two years after buying it started to get super saggy and worn.

Cheap foam is why (what can you expect for $200?!). My parents got a 100% foam queen-size mattress more than 30 years ago, and it's still in very good shape with full-time use. They flip and rotate it every month or so, which probably helps a lot (most mattresses today aren't supposed to be flipped). I think it cost about $1000 in 1989 (about $1800 today).

IKEA has cheap mattresses and expensive mattresses, their expensive mattresses are quite good, but, you know, expensive.

In general, I find IKEA stuff to either cheap or expensive, and you generally get what you pay for. I have a loveseat, armchair, and coffee table from them -- the loveseat has lasted for about a decade and (aside from a few cat claw marks) is as good as new) despite costing in the realm of $1000USD, the armchair was cheap and the bolts on it need frequent tightening, and the coffee table is $30USD of paper yet inexplicably has also lasted almost a decade.

A lot of furniture from IKEA is just way too damn stiff/upright to possibly be comfortable unless you are a contortionist. I don't buy anything there without sitting on it first.

Source for your comment that Ikea uses "cheapest possible foams"?

Idk, they've been available for a while but Purple and Casper just brought heavy marketing to the picture.

Purple and Casper are both only five years old yet I bought a Casper-like queen sized mattress in 2011 from overstock.com for like $300.

Purple and Casper are both crazy-overpriced too.

Serta Simmons, Tempur-Sealy & Sleep Number still control a shocking amount of the market

But how do they control it? Is it just that they make a good product at a market-clearing price, or do they abuse the system somehow? In my mid-sized American city there are not just one but two local mattress makers that I could buy from if I felt like I needed to, and I did once but I don't feel like the choice was either denied to or forced upon me.

A lot of it, if I'm correctly remembering an article I read several years ago, is that several of the most popular brands are actually the same company, and that company also quietly owns several of the most popular chain stores. So you go into a store you think is in competition with the store across the street, and look at mattresses from manufacturers you think are competing against each other, and it's all one company owning both stores and both mattress brands.

It's not as universal as Luxottica, as I said, but it's pretty widespread.

And if I recall rightly, the manufacturers made different products for each vendor, making it very difficult to say, "I like mattress X from company Y, let's see who has the best price on it."

This led to a lot of people having favorite hacks. E.g., a friend bought his mattress from a hotel company. His theory was he was probably paying a little more, but the incentives were better, so he trusted the hotelier more.

There a lot of "if I recall correctly" answers but no one is listing any company names.

Who is this Mattress Powerhouse? From whence they came?

I'll tell you what. You tell me the things you've Googled for, and how the results fall short in terms of finding things that explain the mattress market structure. And then I'll correct whatever issue leads you to not finding the stuff that's out there. Deal?

As with much of the economy, it's winner-take-all. I would put Zenni Optical alongside Luxottica as the duopoly at the moment. Warby is popular, but it's driven a lot by marketing and VC.

Online sales are a very small (~25%) part of the eyewear market. No DTC brand (Warby Parker, Zenni, etc.) is anywhere close to the market dominance of EssilorLuxottica.

Relatively small, but their margins are way better. Of course they haven't overtaken Luxottica, but they are growing quick and are still businesses in the billions.

I think online eyewear sales and awareness have been spiking over the last 5 years, and they have serious product market fit. You tell anyone about the existence of online eyewear and the price and they are sold. Luxottica is winning based on market ignorance at the moment IMO, it's only a matter of time.

It's definitely not a duopoly and if it were it definitely wouldn't include Zenni. Here's one ranking of the top eyeglass retailers in 2015[0]. Another source says Zenni Optical had gross revenue of $214MM in 2018[1], so maybe they should be on that list but they'd be behind Warby Parker let alone some of the others.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/256664/sales-of-the-lead... [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/zenni-optical-cele...

I have two pairs of Warby Parker glasses, and I have to give them this: their in-store customer service is very good.

Online support is good as well. First pair I ordered from them had a defective coating after the first 6 months (it was 'splotchy', it looked like water dried on the lenses but it wouldn't come off'). They sent me a replacement pair for free.

The only downside I have with online glasses is you making adjustments to the fitting of the glasses. Your eye doctor will usually do this for you when you buy glasses for them, but online glasses require you to do it yourself or go into a store (if they have one). With that said, still not a big enough negative for me to go back to buying from my eye doctor.

Warby will reimburse $50 to go to an eye doctor for fitting. See "Fit" here: https://www.warbyparker.com/help. I admittedly haven't needed to do this so I'm not sure what the experience is like.

It was really jarring to order a $25 pair of glasses from Zenni and have them be basically indistinguishable from my old $400 pair.

Similar experience with Jins (brick and mortar Tokyo chain expanding into US, nice designs, lens grinding bots, 30 min turn). $80, better than my old $600 pair.

the WP glasses i tried a few years ago via mailed preview package all seemed like the very lowest quality i had ever handled -- flimsy plastic, cheap-feeling hinges. totally pleased with my 40$ pair from zenni though.

Plus Zenni has more "normal" styles of glasses that you don't need a beard and 6-inch-tall haircut to pull off.

I have no idea what this means.

Oh I think you do.

I totally don't. I have long-ish hair and no beard at the moment. What does this even mean? I'm trying to visualise glasses that require those things to "pull off" but I'm drawing a blank.

It's often true (even for brick-and-morter optometrists) that the floor models are not as solid as the frames they would actually sell you.

Mattresses have a bit of a different issue, in the sense that mattress stores have a (potentially exaggerated) reputation for being of ill repute (e.g. money laundering fronts) and having somewhat scummy sales tactics along the same lines as automotive dealerships (where Tesla, incidentally, would be an example of the "direct to consumer" approach).

The problem with DTC mattresses specifically (and DTC cars, for that matter) is the logistical hell on Earth that is actually getting that product "direct to consumer" (the products themselves are pretty huge and heavy), the higher pricetags (a mattress or a car is considerably more expensive than even a pair of eyeglasses, let alone razors or soap), the inability to reasonably handle returns or repairs, and the inability to "try before you buy" like you can in a brick and mortar store or a dealership.

Tesla worked around some of these problems by having actual physical storefronts/showrooms and service centers (which in turn caused issues in states like Texas that disallow auto manufacturers from owning/operating their own dealerships). The only DTC mattress company I know of that has physical storefronts (at least where I live) is Sleep Number, and it's one of the incumbents.

Mattress salesperson reputations are deeply deserved.

Thankfully my preference (or more precisely my wallet's preference) for sleeping on couches and recliners has limited my ability to confirm or deny those reputations first-hand, so I'll take your word for it :)

Broken, yes. But not by a monopolistic leader. Cheap glasses have always been around. The problem is people want to use their insurance provided by their employer. Most people use vision insurance to buy glasses. Vision insurance is what is broken (it's not actual "insurance" but more of a bad deal savings plan and should be dismantled). Vision insurance requires prices to be increased in order to discount under the plans for an illusion of price discounting. So if you have insurance, you'd probably pay a reasonable and similar price for similar quality to Warby Parker. If you don't have insurance, then you'd pay more.

Razors are special in that demand is a shared delusion. You can save a fortune by reusing your razor. Razors last much much longer than generally advertised, especially if you groom the blade by rubbing it on your arm in the opposite direction of shaving.

I pop off my blade in stick it in rubbing alcohol after use. Lasts 10 times as long.