Black Friday Mattress and Pillow Deals: How to Judge a Real Discount

Mattresses are the most discounted product in the house and the hardest to judge, because you cannot try one properly in a shop and the review sites are largely affiliate-funded. This is the category where a real discount is worth having and a fake one is most expensive.

This is part of our Black Friday sleep guide, and it is the one where I would tell most people to spend the time rather than the money: a week of thinking beats a day of browsing.

The three things that decide whether you sleep well on it

• Support for how you actually sleep. Side sleepers need give at the shoulder and hip; back and front sleepers need less. A mattress that is wrong for your position is wrong at any price.
• Temperature. Memory foam holds heat. If you run warm, or share a bed with someone who does, that matters more than the firmness rating.
• Motion transfer, if you share. This is the one that quietly decides whether two people sleep or one person wakes.

That last point has a bigger answer than a mattress. If you and your partner keep waking each other, it is worth reading what the evidence says about separate beds before spending four figures on a compromise.

Pillows are the cheap half of the problem

A pillow costs a fraction of a mattress and is responsible for a surprising share of morning aches. The right height depends on your sleeping position and your shoulder width, not on the filling the marketing leads with — our guide to choosing a pillow for neck pain sets out how to work out which you need.

If money is tight this month, replacing a flat pillow is a better buy than upgrading a mattress that is merely old rather than wrong.

Before you look at a single price

Write down your sleeping position, whether you run hot, whether you share, and what specifically is wrong with what you have. Buying without those four answers is how people end up with a firm mattress they wanted to be soft. And if the bedroom itself is working against you, the room is cheaper to fix than the bed — our room audit takes about twenty minutes.