You may remember if you’re old enough, what waterbeds were like. We are reminded of a story told by one of our customers. One time he remembered showing off to a girl that he would “pop” a water bed with his butterfly knife. He whipped it out of his pocket and proceeded to flick it about, demonstrating his incomprehensible skill of knife handling, and then pretended to poke a hole in the bed. However, his showing-off went a step too far and resulted in actually poking a hole in the bed, resulting in a spray that soaked the ceiling and the floor alike, and in a panic trying to stop this flow that resembled the Midmar Dam busting at the seam after a summer afternoon downpour!
Do you remember growing up in the 1980’s, it seemed as if everyone had a waterbed. Once a groovy, sexy novelty found only in the Playboy mansion, it’d entered the mainstream, with waterbed stores on every corner.
You may remember if you’re old enough, what water beds were like. We are reminded of a story told by one of our customers. One time he remembered showing off to a girl that he would “pop” a water bed with his butterfly knife. He whipped it out of his pocket and proceeded to flick it about, demonstrating his incomprehensible skill of knife handling, and then pretended to poke a hole in the bed. However, his showing-off went a step too far and resulted in actually poking a hole in the bed, resulting in a spray that soaked the ceiling and the floor alike, and in a panick trying to stop this flow that resembled the Midmar Dam busting at the seam after a summer afternoon downpour!
His parents were not impressed. The girl apparently just laughed and laughed. Bed 1 – Customer 0.
At the peak of waterbed mania, in the mid-1980s, it was 1 in 5 mattresses sold in America. But after that, pop!
It seems everyone got rid of their water beds. Can you remember the last time you saw a waterbed in someone’s home or passed a store selling it?
Where did all the water beds go and, more importantly, why?
The Mystery Unlocked
According to Bill Fish, a certified sleep science coach and founder of a bed store in the USA, there are several reasons water beds have seemingly gone the way of the dinosaur.
For one, companies such as Tempur-Pedic upped the mattress game with memory foam and other more-comfortable-than-box-spring offerings. For another, water beds were kind of a pain. They were heavy, moving one required draining the entire bed. Those were the days…
“It got to the point where many landlords wouldn’t even allow a water bed inside of their buildings,” Fish says.
As the novelty wore off, mattress stores began to focus on higher-end conventional mattresses, and replacement parts for waterbeds became harder to find, Fish says.
How Far Have Beds Come?
Rumour has it that the inventor of the original waterbed may be making a big splash again, soaking up the market – although we highly doubt that. Mattresses have come a long way, certainly far more improved and supportive than waterbeds.
Take our La Difference range made by Sealy. Dermatex fabric with probiotic technology and Dual-Flex Hybrid foam layers incorporating pressure reducing properties, to name a few, it’s a wonder why in this day and age of technology someone would want to bring back waterbeds. But hey, we aren’t knocking it, We just feel we are waves ahead of a once infamous rocking trend.
If the La Difference range doesn’t grab your interest the way we think it will, then go ahead and test drive our very own Sleep Laboratory which will give us as well as you, our customer, a greater insight to your sleep patterns and contours through a range of sensors which imprint an image onto a screen. This allows us to correctly advise you on the best options suited for your sleep patterns and budget.
It’s truly one of our best service oriented products, with many fantastic results experienced by our customers.
So be sure to check out our store details, head on over and come have a chat with us!