Because of inventory, ergo a factory ships a mattress, a customer buys a mattress, there's something for investigators to grab onto. This would on the surface

Because of inventory, ergo a factory ships a mattress, a customer buys a mattress, there's something for investigators to grab onto. This would on the surface make it seem to not be very good for money laundering unless the retailer also controlled manufacturing and could cook the shipment books there which is unlikely. Now here's where this conspiracy theory gets interesting. Stick with me for the briefest of intros to what makes for a good money laundering business. Typically businesses for which it's hard to account for the number of customers and who don't have inventory that can be traced are better: golf courses, bowling alleys, car washes, etc. The case of car washes is pretty awesome in fact and relates well to the mattress conspiracy theory. At one point they were getting busted because investigators would look at their water usage, but that was quickly resolved by becoming "environmental" and installing water capture and re-use systems. Now it's all about making the power usage look like the place is busy and counting on local investigators to have other priorities than long term 24/7 stake-outs. Okay, okay, with this in mind, back to the mattress company. How often are we told to replace our mattresses these days? I've quite literally had a mattress from Ethan Allen for 20 years and it's still like new. However, my wife keeps pointing out that mattresses should be replace every eight. With this in mind, how many people are like me? I suspect a lot - if your back isn't hurting, if you aren't feeling springs, if it's still firm, why replace it, heck, that would introduce the opportunity to get a worse mattress. As such, there's likely not a lot of turnover, so... A mattress company could use this to their advantage by making large orders of mattresses, claiming they sold all of them, while only selling a tenth. They could then ship the remaining new mattresses to 'recyclers', claiming they were customer exchanges. Having physical stores, they could claim a lot of their business was cash and by having a lot of stores they make it all but impossible to stake them out with anything but a satellite which few law enforcement agencies who would be interested in catching this scheme would invest in & by being in locations with shared parking lots could make tracking all but impossible even by counting cars. Honestly, I think it could work and we are all part of it for buying into the whole replace your mattress every eight years line! OMG.