Where’s Justin Resnick when I need him?

A few weeks ago, my Street Academy trivia teammate Jeremy McNamara griped on Facebook about the difficulty in finding a suitable bed mattress.  I commented that someone should call Justin Resnick.

And then I realized.  It’s been a while since ANYONE has heard from Justin Resnick.

At one point in time, Justin Resnick’s radio commercials received more airplay than the Backstreet Boys and ‘NSYNC combined.  Trust me.  You think the Fuccillo used car ads are annoying?  You haven’t heard a Resnick’s Mattress advert, have you?  And those were just the radio ads – there were also newspaper advertisements featuring a caricature of Resnick, attired in pajamas, extolling the virtues of his mattresses and the locations of all his mattress stores.

Those advertisements – both newspaper and radio – are gone now.

Here’s how they all started.

In 1995, one of the last locally-owned mattress companies in the Capital District, Troy Mattress, agreed to sell its holdings to Justin Resnick, whose Resnick’s Mattress company owned several stores in the Hudson Valley area.  No big deal, right?  Companies get bought by other companies every day.

That was until the big sign removal issue.

Resnick had a huge sign erected at the Troy Mattress store on 1529 Central Avenue.  The building’s landlord, who also owned Air-Tite Window and Sidings, had the sign removed, claiming the sign was too big for Colonie’s zoning laws.  Resnick sued, but the suit was thrown out of court.

That didn’t stop Resnick from putting together a series of radio commercials, all announcing that people could find his store on Central Avenue, “where Air-Tite Business Center tore our sign down.”

Those radio commercials ran for over two years, and were both iconic and annoying.  Any time Resnick opened a new mattress store in the Capital District, any time there was a mattress sale, any time Resnick had some promotional event, he would list every store location at the end of the radio commercial, finishing off with the Colonie store’s location, “where Air-Tite Business Center tore our sign down.”

The dispute between Resnick and Air-Tite was resolved in 1998, when Resnick and Air-Tite swapped locations in the Colonie storefront.  Resnick’s Mattress moved into a smaller area of the building, while Air-Tite replaced its storefront signage with a Resnick’s Mattress sign.  Both companies claimed victory in the dispute, but the real winners were the Capital District radio listeners who didn’t care who tore down whose sign or whose sign was re-erected.

Check out this vintage ad from 1996.  Twin mattresses for $29.99, including free frames, free delivery, free set-up and free removal of your old mattress.  And double your money back if you can find the same mattress for less within 100 miles of a Resnick’s Troy Mattress Outlet store.

Too good to be true, right?

Well, the State Attorney General thought it was too good to be true.

And that was bad news for Justin Resnick.

In 2000, the New York State Attorney General’s Office filed suit against Resnick’s Mattress, claiming that the company advertised inexpensive $29.99 – $59.99 mattresses, but when customers arrived in the store, employees dissuaded the customers from purchasing those advertised mattresses and pointed them instead to more expensive models.  You know, the old “bait and switch” tactic.  Resnick settled the suit by paying the Attorney General’s Office a $10,000 fine and providing a five-year warranty on any mattress they sold for under $100.

The State Attorney General at the time?  Eliot Spitzer.  Of course, a few years later, Spitzer had other distinct problems that involved a high-end mattress.  Maybe he should have considered purchasing a Resnick’s Mattress when he had a chance to do so.  But I digress.

Resnick’s Mattress eventually expanded to 29 stores in the Northeast, but by 2007 the mattress company was down to 14 stores, including six in the Capital Region.  That year, the company was sold to another mattress factory, RFMD Mattress Co. of Newburgh.

And thus ended an era of self-promoting, goofy radio ads with a pajamas-wearing pitchman.