Price Watch Conor PopeYou spot the prices, we ask the questions
Christine O'Rourke went in search of a good quality mattress recently and identified the Sealy "Bonne Nuit" brand as the one for her. "Arnotts quoted me a whopping €2,200 for a six-footer - and this is just the mattress, not the bed," she writes. Wisely, she decided to so some research and went online, where she found prices in the UK coming in at between £600-800.
"I rang the manufacturer and found out who in the North stocked these mattresses. I ended up buying the mattress from Patrick Collins Furniture on Andersonstown Road in Belfast for £475 - around €700 - plus a €70 delivery charge."
She points out that this price was not a sale price and she was offered it without having to haggle. "I queried this massive price difference with Arnotts. They didn't get back to me, except to ask me who I'd bought it off."
When she pursued the matter, she says, Arnotts told her their agent suggested the Northern Irish stockist may have been selling below cost. "In fact I had checked the price with another NI stockist who had also quoted me a price under £500 - they can hardly all be selling below cost!" When PriceWatch rang Arnotts, it was quoted a price of €2,260 for a six-foot Sealy Bonne Nuit mattress (the actual size is 180cm, slightly less than six feet).
Patrick Collins in Belfast, meanwhile, was willing to sell the same mattress for £475, plus a £58.75 delivery charge, or €783 including delivery. Michael Collins of the Northern Ireland outlet said that while furniture sellers in Northern Ireland in general would have smaller profit margins than their counterparts in the Republic, they were not selling this mattress below cost.
A spokesman for Silent Night, the company which distributes the bed north and south of the Border, said the recommended retail price (RRP) of the mattress in the UK was £992 or €1,357. The spokesman said it had a pricing structure in the Republic "which may be slightly more than the UK but there is a justification for that". The justification, he said, included shipping costs, as well as higher VAT and other overheads in the Republic. He also said online stores were able to offer discounted prices due to lower overheads.
When PriceWatch asked Arnotts to explain the price difference, a spokesman said the Bonne Nuit mattress was no longer on its shop floor and the prices quoted were catalogue prices. He said the company preferred not to sell beds to people without giving them a chance to lie on them and did not generally recommend people purchase beds out of the catalogue although it would quote prices.
When the Bonne Nuit mattress had last been on display in the store, the spokesman said, it was during the sale which finished at the end of July. At that stage it was retailing for €1,450 - still substantially more than it cost across the Border. The spokesman accepted that the price of Bonne Nuit was "standing out like a sore thumb" - other Sealy products seem to bear a closer resemblance to the RRP, he said, and promised the store would investigate the apparent anomaly further.
