The hide-a-bed or sofa-bed is really, if you think about it in the abstract, a great idea. A couch sits quietly in the corner being a couch until there are more bodies than beds and then you just swing the coffee table out of the way, throw the pillows across the room, pull on the mechanism and–boom!–you’ve got an extra bed.
You would think in a time of smart bombs and fuzzy logic that figuring out how to make a decent bed fold in half and tuck out of sight wouldn’t be a tremendous feat of engineering, but the fact is that hide-a-beds are universally terrible. Nobody has ever really had a good night’s sleep on one and they pretty well inhibit any other activities associated with beds. A thin, pathetic mattress barely protects you from a steel structure that is never flat, frequently rocks when you move around, and generally involves a bar that pushes into the small of your back all night. And it goes without saying that if you are taller than 5’10” your feet will hang over the end.
So why is this? There’s just no question that with the application of a small amount of ingenuity and a higher price tag American industry or certainly Italian industry could come up with a hide-a-bed you’d be happy to sleep on. They probably figured it out years ago. The reason they don’t exist must be a lack of demand.
The reason for the lack of demand for such an obviously good thing has finally occurred to me. The person who buys it never sleeps on it. Who has ever spent the night on a hide-a-bed which they themselves have purchased? Nobody. You buy one to be used by your guests. You only ever sleep on one that someone else bought. The person who owns the “sleeps 6” beach house that features a double, two twins, and a sofa-bed is never person #5 or person #6.
If a $1500 hide-a-bed sat next to a $500 model in the showroom and the difference was the quality of the bed rather than the sofa, who would pay the premium for a bed that some one else is going to use for just a night or two?
The result of this is that everyone we know, over the course of their lifetime, spends countless hazy nights trying to relax and sleep, and then wakes disoriented and stiff while insisting that they slept fine, no problem, just give me about a half-an-hour in the sauna and I’ll be ready to go. We keep doing this to each other because we never do it to ourselves.
(Well, actually, I don’t have one so I’m blameless.)