Judge rules local retailer liable for faulty mattress
By DAVE DANFORTH Daily Press Staff Writer
A Santa Monica retailer has been ordered to make good on a $2,133 mattress that was exchanged five times over a year even though it still left a local couple relatively sleepless.
The case of Ortho Sleep, a retail outlet which is one of many in the Los Angeles area, illustrates that a judge may override a shop’s insistence that it will go only so far to satisfy a customer. In this case, Ortho insisted that while it would exchange mattresses, its contracts specify that a dissatisfied customer can’t get a refund.
Small Claims commissioner Thomas Dunlap ruled Friday that a state mer-chantability law provides customers with a warranty of protection. Holding that Santa Monican Charlotte Chemtob had “gone out of her way” to get a good mattress, he ordered Ortho to pay her $2,700, overriding the “no refund” clause in its contracts.
The case could be a key retail holding because merchants often include boiler-plate language in sales contracts limiting what they will do to ensure customer satisfaction. In this case, Dunlap created a sort of lemon law rule for defective mattresses.
Alan and Charlotte Chemtob bought their first $2,133 mattress from a Santa Monica Ortho store in January 2001. They soon found the mattress developed “body impressions,” failing to re-shape after use.
“They were dents,” Commissioner Dunlap observed.
In March, they got a replacement mattress of the same type, but it developed the same problem, Chemtob said. Ortho had a “process” for testing mattresses which involved stretching a rope across the mattress. If the “dents” were an inch and a half or more, the shop would replace them, for a delivery fee.
By the fifth mattress, the Chemtobs were sleepless and out of patience. They stashed the last Ortho mattress in their garage and bought another brand. But they couldn’t get a refund from Ortho, which cited its no-refund policy. And, Chemtob said they weren’t allowed to even see the “warranty reports” that arose each time a rope test was done on their mattresses.
“We all know the value of a good night’s sleep,” Chemtob said in court. “This has been a nightmare.” She observed that sleeping on the Ortho mattresses was like “sitting in a sinkhole.”
Chemtob hasn’t been the only one who has had difficulty getting satisfaction from the mattress chain. The Southland Better Business Bureau gave the parent W.E. Bedding Corp. an “unsatisfactory” rating after noting complaints that the company failed to honor money-back guarantees.
The complaints were similar to the Chemtobs: “Customers allege mattresses sink or sag in the middle within the first year of ownership,” although some carried 10 to 15 year warranties.
Dunlap ordered the $2,700 refund (the higher amount included some upgrades the Chemtobs had tried). He also allowed Ortho to fetch its dimpled mattress out of the Chemtob garage in the next 30 days.
When an Ortho representative tried to tack on a fee for the removal, Dunlap would have none of it.
“You’re a mattress company. You have trucks and things of that sort,” he noted.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 20, 2003. Read the original PDF.