Going to the Mattresses

“That Sonny’s going wild. He’s thinking of going to the mattresses already.” So famously said Clemenza in The Godfather. While Sonny’s strategies didn’t play out very well in the end, he was hardly alone in his mattress obsession. There is an online war to sell you a mattress, and like many previous internet battles, this one is spilling out onto the streets. “The cheap-to-run stores—often planted next to big-box retailers in high-traffic areas—function in part as billboards for the brand. In a sense, actual mattress-selling is almost secondary to the broader mission: simply making people think about mattresses.” In CityLab, Sarah Holder gives some historical background on how America became a nation of mattress stores. (Maybe Luca Brasi had it right. He slept with the fishes.)