{"id":1203,"date":"2019-12-12T15:53:10","date_gmt":"2019-12-12T23:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/mattress-blog\/?p=1203"},"modified":"2019-12-13T15:42:27","modified_gmt":"2019-12-13T23:42:27","slug":"usa-today-chinese-mattress-dumping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/insights\/usa-today-chinese-mattress-dumping\/","title":{"rendered":"The untold part of USA Today’s Chinese mattress dumping story"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Earlier this week, USA Today reported<\/a> on the finding by US trade agencies that Chinese companies had been unfairly dumping mattresses into the US market.  Overall, I found this story to be a well-researched, well-written distillation of recent events related to Chinese mattress imports. That said, there is one line that was very troubling to me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Experts agree that the quality of the typically entry-level mattresses was fine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This line can be inconspicuously found at the end of a paragraph that makes no other mention of quality — in an article that, apart from this sentence, also contains no discussion of quality. There is no substantiation provided as to who these “experts” are, or how they assessed or determined the quality of these mattresses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As one such expert, I would certainly disagree with the assertion that the vast majority of mattresses in question here are anything other than very low-quality. Perhaps the author’s intent was that these mattresses have quality that is on par with other low-priced entry-level mattresses, in which case I wouldn’t wholeheartedly disagree with that. But of course, these mattresses are also of very low quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason this is important to me is that there is a bigger aspect to this story, which is how these ultra-cheap mattresses are changing the way people think about shopping for mattresses — and in turn, how many mattresses are ending up in landfills. The first part of this is a longer post for another day, but suffice it to say that the presence of ultra-cheap mattresses in venues like Amazon has caused many people to start thinking of mattresses as a disposable item — one they can use for a few years and just throw away. While it might seem easy in economic terms to accept a 2-year lifespan for a mattress whose price is 20% that of a good mattress, this trade-off ignores a huge external cost that is borne by every one of us — the cost to the environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you have any concern whatsoever about the environment, climate change, or the like, you should want the mattress you purchase to stay in your bedroom — and out of a landfill — as long as possible.  Mattresses are one of the bulkiest household items, consuming an average of about 25 cubic feet, and they are far less compactible than regular garbage.  Making matters worse, the ultra-cheap mattresses being described in this article consist almost entirely of polyurethane foam, which is a petroleum-based product that takes thousands of years to biodegrade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On top of all that, the carbon footprint of making a mattress like this is enormous. For starters, a lot of petroleum goes directly into each of these products.  Then, once they are made, they are shipped halfway around the world on a boat, then taken in other vehicles to centralized warehouses, from which they are ultimately transported yet again all the way to your home. All told, each mattress has quite a substantial carbon footprint, so making 5 lousy mattresses when only one good one could have sufficed carries a significant environmental toll.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bottom line is that the duties imposed on these Chinese mattresses have been successful so far in protecting US manufacturing from unfair competition. However, they have done nothing to undo the ultra-cheap domestically-made competitors they have spawned. And as a result, many mattress shoppers are still being trained to think of mattresses as a disposable item. This trend not only poses an unabated threat to high-quality US manufacturing, but it also poses a clear and present danger to our environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an aside, I would have really liked to have been consulted on this piece. I’ve spoken extensively on the evolution of the competitive landscape in the mattress industry. In fact, knowingly or unknowingly, the author even borrowed a phrase to describe this trend that I coined<\/a> earlier this year: ultra-cheap mattresses<\/a><\/em>. I wish I could have helped bring to life how much more is at stake here than first meets the eye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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TweetEarlier this week, USA Today reported on the finding by US trade agencies that Chinese companies had been unfairly dumping mattresses into the US market.  Overall, I found this story to be a well-researched, well-written distillation of recent events related to Chinese mattress imports. That said, there is one line that was very troubling to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[53,51,54,52],"class_list":["post-1203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mattress-industry","tag-china","tag-environment","tag-imports","tag-mattresses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1203"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1228,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions\/1228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodbed.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}