Online Mattress Marketing Is A Hellscape, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: The uncomfortable truth of mattress reviews, the best band from every state and the secret of eyedroppers.
It Is Both The Best And Worst Time To Buy A Mattress
The cool thing about the internet is you can write almost anything and publish it online. You can write words, like right here, which people can read. You can also write code that will let people enter their credit card information and a shipping address, and with a click of a button ship them an item — almost any item, really — for an agreed-upon sum of money.
The uncool thing about the internet is sometimes those lines between writing words and selling things become blurred. You see, when a seller of things says that their thing is the best thing, people are loath to believe them. In the past, companies just tried their hardest to make the best thing and hope that word-of-mouth would elevate them to their deserved spot in the marketplace. But because it is so easy to write things and publish them on the internet, sellers-of-things can contact the writers-of-words and offer them a deal: Recommend our product and we will give you a share of the sales. Of course, it's never this easy.
Such is the narrative of David Zax's exhaustive investigation into the uneasy relationship between mattress startups and those who review mattresses. It's a timeless tale of grift and betrayal that could only happen on the internet of 2017.
A English Pub Might Be The World's Best Restaurant
It's hard to read this Richard Vines, Bloomberg's chief food critic, review of Black Swan, and not find him to be a tedious snob. Not because he finds Black Swan, which was recently named by TripAdvisor as the best fine dining restaurant in the world, bad. But because he's found that it's not actually bad. "It's actually very good," he writes of the restaurant that was already named the best in the world by a successful travel website.
You see, as chief food critic, Vines has eaten at all the top places. He's happy to tell you this. TripAdvisor's recommendation, because it's from a website that neglects to put a space between "trip" and "advisor", may be suspect. But Vines went to Black Swan, and found it to be, surprisingly, good.
Thank you Richard Vines for your journalistic rigor. We can't have these upstart websites just naming unknown restaurants the best in the world. That's your job, of course.
You Will Probably Disagree With This List Of The Best Band From Every State
By now, you've read enough lists online to know and understand that they are shameless traffic grabs. To list things is to exclude others, and boy howdy do people love to know what thing they care about has been most definitely maliciously left out.
Thrillist, as of late, are putting an interesting spin on the tired genre of listing things that exist: Earnestly creating lists that are so hopelessly ambitious that no one could seriously consider themselves definitive. Dan Jackson and Anthony Schneck's The Best Band From Every State is no exception. They fully acknowledge the futility of their endeavor.
Before you dive in and give into your anger, consider this: What if this list was merely trying to present a particular viewpoint, a taste. What if, upon seeing a band you did not recognize, you didn't get mad and instead used this as a chance to open yourself up to new things? That might be nice. You can still believe in your heart that Clutch is the best band out of Maryland, but why not give Beach House a listen?
The Drug Companies Are Cheating You Out Of Eye Drops
Have you ever had to administer eyedrops to yourself? It sucks. You gotta tilt your head back into the light, hold the dropper an impossible distance away from your eyes and then somehow target bomb your eyeball with a comically-large drop of solution. It feels like something that no one is good at.
As it turns out, ProPublica's Marshall Allen reports, this is not your fault. The dang drug companies have designed the droppers to administer drops that are far too large for your eye to hold. This residual drop that tears down your cheeks is by design.
Granted, these wastes might be a drop in the bucket compared to the eye-watering amount of waste America's healthcare system produces on a given day, but it all adds up. And for the people who rely on prescription eye drop medications, the costs and waste is a harsh reality. So just wait for a company to design a properly-sized third-party eyedropper. Because the only way to fix issues borne out of systemic problems with out healthcare system is with more capitalism.
[NPR]
