The Profit Prophet

The Mattress Mafia: How a Sleepy Industry Manufactured a Fake Crisis, Built an Impenetrable Retail Cartel, and Then Watched a Single Website Burn It All Down

Episode Summary

The American mattress industry spent decades engineering one of the most sophisticated consumer confusion rackets in retail history — identical beds sold under hundreds of different names, prices that meant nothing, and a dealership model that made comparison shopping almost legally impossible. Then a 30-year-old with a spreadsheet and a direct-to-consumer website didn't just disrupt the industry — he exposed exactly how badly it had been lying to you, and the cartel's response was uglier than you'd expect.