Is Mattress Firm A Money Laundering Business

The Bizarre Theory About Mattress House Explained

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We've probably all seen a Mattress House on a street corner or in a shopping plaza, only most of us probably don't pay too much attention to it. Similar any other shop, they tend to blend into the groundwork unless nosotros happen to be shopping for the items they carry. Mattress Firm, equally the proper noun suggests, is a chain that sells mattresses, and since many people don't buy new mattresses every week, you might call up information technology would be an easy shop to ignore.

Notwithstanding, if you happen to come across two or three of the same store in a single plaza or half-mile stretch of road, you lot might start to take notice. Over the past few years, people have begun to have more than and more than notice of Mattress Business firm stores, precisely because there seems to be so many of them. In fact, one could say there appears to be a suspicious number of Mattress Firm locations, oftentimes in very close proximity to each other. It is not unusual to see several Mattress Business firm stores located within just a few miles of each other, clustered effectually the same cake, or even one store right adjacent to another, as was the case in Houston in 2015 (via Reddit). The unusual placement of their brick-and-mortar locations has led some conspiracy-minded people to conjecture that Mattress House is not a legit concern, just actually serves as a front for illegal money laundering.

An alleged coin laundering scheme

The money laundering theory seems to have originated on online bulletin boards. People began posting about Mattress Business firm on sites like Reddit as far dorsum as 2015, speculating in conspiracy subreddits as to why the company could possibly exist opening then many new stores so close to one another.

"Mattress firm is some sort of behemothic money laundering scheme," one Reddit user asserted in 2018, saying they were "everywhere and always empty. I retrieve seeing iv mattress firms all on each corner of an intersection one time, there is no way there is such a demand for mattresses." Many other users agreed that this theory made a lot of sense. "There'south definitely something going on with those mattress firms. All all of a sudden they popped upward literally everywhere ... And they are always empty," posted another user.

The Times of Northwest Indiana even noted in Dec 2015 that a unmarried 8-tenths of a mile-long stretch between the border of Schererville and Highland, Indiana, had five separate Mattress Business firm locations, while the nearby Indianapolis Boulevard had half dozen locations within 2.5 miles of each other, according to Snopes. These stores seemed to keep popping up close to each other, adding fuel to the conspiracy that these eerily omnipresent, largely empty stores had to exist a front for something else. After all, people don't demand to buy new mattresses that often, so what could all these storefronts really be for?

The company denied any involvement in money laundering

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For its role, the visitor has vehemently denied all claims that they have been involved in any money laundering activities. Although it acknowledges that store location arrangements may seem foreign, there is a perfectly reasonable caption for why people often meet then many Mattress Firms then close together.

"In the early on 2000s, Mattress Firm gear up a goal to become the get-go border-to-border, coast-to-declension specialty mattress retailer. To attain that goal, the company intentionally grew very quickly over a span of 9 years through acquisitions and organic growth. Equally function of the conquering of several competitors, sometimes with multiple acquisitions in a single market, we inherited existing, long-term leases for store locations. Many of these inherited charter locations happened to exist near our existing store base of operations. Once the stores were rebranded with Mattress Firm, a shopping centre with 2 different competing mattress stores took on a new look," a Mattress House spokesperson explained to Snopes. The representative noted that the company has since been working to "rationalize our store fleet" and vehemently stated that money laundering is "admittedly non the reason why we have so many stores." Just these assertions haven't necessarily done much to stop the conspiracy theories.

The company has had financial problems

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In fact, this theory may accept more staying power than almost because the connection betwixt Mattress Firm and shady money practices isn't entirely unfounded. In December 2017, Mattress House'south parent company, Steinhoff International, was accused of accounting fraud, although there was no bear witness of money laundering and Mattress Firm itself was never mentioned in the involvement, according to Reuters.

In 2018, the company faced accusations of fraud and kickbacks, equally former employees declared that some Mattress Firm in-house real estate executives were engaged in a kickback scheme with existent estate brokers and developers, who offered them bribes for setting upward costly property deals, according to Forbes. The company then alleged bankruptcy in Oct 2018.

Although none of these activities involved coin laundering, the lingering fiscal worries could just fuel the long-running theory that Mattress Firm stores are really fronts for money laundering. While the company has said that it "continues to encounter positive growth and profitability in 2021," the conspiracies surrounding the store probable won't completely disappear anytime shortly (via Snopes).

Source: https://www.grunge.com/702693/the-bizarre-theory-about-mattress-firm-explained/

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