Caution: if you're near a bed, your own or someone else's, or if you have food in front of you while perusing this article, it would be advisable to stop now and save it for later. Because eeugh.
On Friday's Liveline, Joe Duffy got a call from a woman who'd bought a brand new mattress, only for it to fall apart after about three weeks. It was only then that the caller discovered that the mattress she had bought as new, was in fact, a re-covered old mattress. She had spent three weeks sleeping on a stranger's old mattress. On Monday, mattress and furniture seller Mick Byrne called Liveline to tell Joe that passing old mattresses off as new happens a lot more than people might think. And, of course, with an old mattress, comes any amount of old dirt:
"They don't even attempt to clean the old mattress of all the stains that would be on it like urine, blood, anything like that."
And that's before you get to the bed bugs, hairs and sundry other unpleasantness that is guaranteed to be contained within a mattress that might be 10 or more years old. If the thought of sleeping on someone's old mattress gives you a feeling somewhere between the shivers and nausea, I feel your pain. The fact that people could be making a cottage industry for themselves re-selling old mattresses as new to unwitting buyers is probably a sign that the decline of western civilisation is more pronounced than we first thought.
"They have Facebook pages which they seem to shut down every few weeks when the bad reviews start appearing."
Beware of mattresses recommended on social media, seems to be Mick's message, because people will review what they think is their new mattress – which has been sold at a decent enough price and delivered promptly – and say how great it is and their review will stay on the page for a few days until they discover they've been sleeping on a steaming pile of old sludge, hiding under a fresh cover.
Where are the people who are flogging these things getting them from? Joe asked. The answer was guaranteed to make you feel even more nauseous:
"They're picking them up out of shops that don't want to pay to have them taken away and disposed of properly and they're picking them up anywhere they can, out of skips and different places."
If your skin isn't crawling at this stage, you must be some kind of artificial lifeform. The sellers, Mick told Joe, can be very aggressive, as well. His message: go to a proper shop when searching for a new mattress. He would say that, though, wouldn't he, given that he's in the business of selling mattresses. Ah yes, but, says Mick, when you buy from a shop and something goes wrong, you can bring it back. Which is a fair point. I'm off to have a shower now.
You can listen back to Mick's call with Joe and the rest of Monday’s Liveline here.