DO NOT SKIP THIS UNDER PENALTY OF LAW
Why Mattresses Come with Warning Tags
If you live in the United States and have ever looked at your bed mattress while changing the sheets, you have likely noticed an interesting tag. In ominous terms, this tag warns you not to remove it. If you do, FBI agents will appear, cascading down from a helicopter, crashing through your bedroom windows, and carting you off to a prison on some distant island not even known to most mapmakers.
No, not really. The tag does state that it is illegal to remove it, but it isn’t a warning meant for consumers. As the consumer at least, you can remove the tag without repercussion. But that hasn’t stopped it from becoming the subject of countless jokes. Most notably the tag has been lampooned by Dilbert, Pee-wee Herman, and National Lampoon magazine. There’s even a commercial by Serta (a mattress company) in which the removal of one of the tags results in the culprits—sheep—being put in jail. In fairness, sheep are not exactly part of the consumer market most mattress companies have in mind.
So, with a warning that seems ridiculous to so many, why is the tag there in the first place? The answer involves looking back at earlier versions of the mattress you dread leaving every morning. Today, there’s not a lot of reason to think that the contents of your mattress are anything other than what you bargained for—but that wasn’t always the case. Before springs and coils and memory foam, mattresses were filled with straw and other cheap, safe materials. Unfortunately, there were a lot of less-than-honest vendors out there. Mental Floss explains: “[In the early 20th century], mattresses were often constructed with some unsavory stuffing—horse hair, corn husks, food waste, old rags, newspaper, and whatever else a manufacturer could come by were regularly shoved inside. Consumers would never see the stuffing, so no harm, no foul, right? Not really. Some of this stuff harbored bacteria and household pests that gave unwary consumers a not-so-restful slumber.”
The tag was thus designed to hold manufacturers accountable for disclosing what was in the mattress. Law required them to print what was inside on the outside of the mattress. Manufacturers could still lie, but doing so would mean risking being discovered later on; a government inspector could obtain one of the mattresses for an impromptu check, and if anything other than what was listed was inside, the manufacturer would be subject to fines and other penalties.
There remained a problem, however: You could still comply with that law when stuffing a mattress with anything. And that’s what a lot of manufacturers did; they carried on using rags, newspapers, animal hair, and more. No one was going to buy these mattresses, of course, but the industry had a way around that too. The inspectors would do their spot checks while the mattresses were still in the manufacturers’ care, then once that was over, the manufacturers or retailers would simply remove the labels. Consumers were no better off than they were before.
To put an end to this issue, Congress made it illegal to remove the tag “prior to the time any textile fiber product is sold and delivered to the ultimate consumer.” And, perhaps to protect themselves, manufacturers also printed a “do not remove” warning on the tag itself. So, if you want to remove the one tag from your mattress, rest assured that you can do so with impunity. Just make sure the tag doesn’t claim that the mattress is stuffed with old corn husks—or worse—first!