Late fall, the rollout of Sleep Country Canada stores into select Walmart locations started in Quebec. They’ve now worked their way to Western Canada with locations in Saskatoon, Lethbridge, Calgary, Edmonton, and Duncan, BC.

The express stores are around 700 square feet and may replace the hair salon, optometrist/eye glasses, nail salon or other smaller “stores” to make room. Sleep Country has around 300 locations and simply wants to expand their customer reach. Walmart is certainly the place to do that, so it seems like a win-win for both companies.

Mattresses, along with jewelry, certainly have enough markup to make them profitable, even after paying Walmart. When furniture markup is around 300 to 400% (compared to less than 10% for electronics) and mattresses are significantly higher than that, make sure you shop around. For over a decade, a national retailers has had a billboard on a busy intersection in Edmonton advertising 50% mattress sales. That’s not a sale – its re-establishing a lower (but still) retail price. That’s taught me to believe: 50% off is actually full sticker price.

Consumer Report is a good place to start your research. They’ve done testing on everything from $1,000 to $3,000 mattresses and found very little difference when cutting them open and comparing coil count and padding. In their opinion, suggested retail pricing is pure fiction and fancy phrases and brand names don’t justify the additional cost. Feel free to test-sleep them for a few minutes and shop around. If you have a Costco card and are looking for a new mattress, January is the month Costco carries them (as in: check it out right now) since it’s only a seasonal in stock item.