[Ever consider stuffing money in your mattress to guard against a banking collapse? Here’s a guest editorial from our friend Erich Simon that suggests you might be better off taking your nest egg and buying…a bunch of mattresses. We’re not sure whether Erich’s point is being made tongue-in-cheek, but we are convinced, after an exchange of several e-mails, that he is a true connoisseur of bedding and accessories.  RA]

I just shelled out $2,400 for a traditional, coil-spring twin XL mattress set. Apparently I am not alone with mattress horror stories. Is the new mattress worth $2,400? I don’t know, but it’s got a 10-year warranty. Only problem with that is a $2,400 replacement mattress in ten years will be a smidgen of what I just received.  Adjusted for Net Present Value and the ongoing bleed of “quality metric,” probably a lot less, so for all intents and purposes my purchase will have depreciated down to sub-zero. Of course, if I were buying the hedonic of a new computer ten years out I would no doubt improve on existing “capacity.”

A mattress is a better barometer than a computer or a traditional store of value, including gold. Mattresses consume scarce resources like cotton and petroleum. Mattresses are something everybody needs, and they wear out and have to be replaced. Mattresses are not purely “frivolous tangibles” and speak to the Means of Production (MOP) in our factoried society. They are price-pointed to exhaustion on the demand side. Labor costs, like everything else, while in the short term can fall from layoffs, will only continue to rise as increases in the minimum wage are passed through the pipeline. » Read the full article