You only buy a new bed a few times in a lifetime, which is why bed shoppers look bewildered and lost.

questions than it answered. The more I tried to understand what I was up against, the more slippery it became.

For example, as luck would have it, that $15,000 bed was on special today. The super king could be had for the same price as a single bed. A snip at $6899.

Such a good deal. But, guess what, roughly the same bed (more on that later) at another store was also on sale and under $6000.

Then at another store another kind of similar bed could be got for under $5000.

It showed me two things: the single bed price at the first store was a shockingly bad buy and bed prices are as flexible as a gymnast.

I asked the salesman if he had ever sold the $15,000 bed at full price. No, he said. While legally a store couldn’t have a product permanently on sale, I sensed there was usually some deal on the go somewhere in the shop.

But it wasn’t just the prices that were confusing.

Comparing competing springs, foams, and coverings technologies felt like being sucked into a black hole.

The top beds came with a long list of ring-fenced patented names with ‘‘TM’’ floating just above, which made them seem impressive and essential all at once.

I wanted to compare apples with apples, going from store to store asking how much their apple cost? But the bed world made this hard. Even if the stores had the same brand, the models had different names and different tweaks and layers.