Good timing on the thread. My current Sealy pillow-top mattress is about 10 years old and has horrible sag in it, at times you can't even tell I'm sleeping in it because by body has sunk so far down the covers basically look flat. With just my head on the pillow at a painful angle sticking out. But I'm a miserable drunk and suffer through it. Now it started giving the wife back / neck pains, and if there is one thing I do not want it is a cranky wife. Time to upgrade mattresses (not wifes).
We went to the Sleep Number store two weekends ago to get a feel for them, the features, and pricing. Was an interesting experience with the sales guy, letting you lay on the bed and find a comfortable number, then showing you a pressure map of a "regular" setting vs. where you said you were comfortable. Then we went through their different styles and tiers. Their standard pillow top adjustable King size was going to be somewhere around $3,600. That's with no bells and whistles, adjustable head / legs, or anything. Stepping up to the Memory Foam version would have put us in the almost $5,000 range. This was a quick quote before we walked out, so no negotiations or big promotional discounts, etc... Still, can't imagine more than 15% off which is right around $3k for the regular bed.
Came home and talked about it for a bit and decided we had never tried a Memory Foam bed at all, but had heard stories with heat and firmness. We weren't going to drop $3k+ on a new bed without trying out the other stuff. So I ordered one of the $400 Sleep Innovations Queen Memory Foam mattresses off Amazon. It'll be here today at some point. I figured $400 is no big deal and worth the test to kind of see how we react to a Memory Foam mattresses. At the worst we move it to the guest room and replace the mattress from her old apartment that is like 15 years+.
If we like it and it wears out in a year because it is cheap then we'll look at a name brand one. If not maybe we'll consider a Sleep Number and think about adjustable firmness / head for when and if we decide to have kids and she's knocked up.