Mattress Firm Sees Shares Snooze

Mattress Firm

, a company that sells its own mattresses as well as those made by other businesses, saw its shares fall 10% on Tuesday evening. As a result, the quarterly sales for the company fell a good way short of Wall Street estimates. Mattress Firm's stock dropped a staggering 12% to $30.90. It's not all bad for the company, which saw first quarter revenue go up 38% to $209.8 million from $151.9 million the previous year. Still, this recent result is below analyst estimates and will be disappointing to company execs. The three months leading to May 1 saw the company increase net income to $9.7 million, or 29 cents per share, from $1 million, or 5 cents per share. The company itself said that it is expecting to earn 26 cents to 29 cents per share in the second quarter on revenue of $270 million to $275 million, though it is not completely clear where that optimism is coming from. In this economic climate, with consumer spending still low, it seems obvious to assume that a new mattress is pretty low on most people's priority list, even if they could probably do with one. It stands to reason that, when times are tough, people will cope with an old mattress even if there is a spring poking through. Hey, you can always turn it over. People do crazier things in times when the money isn't flooding the bank. The analysts had been forecasting a profit of 33 cents per share and $278.3 million in revenue, but proved to be pretty wide of the mark. In fact, shares of Mattress Firm lost $3.96, or 11.2% of their value, falling to 31.34 after hours. Prior to that, during regular trading, they fell 26 cents and closed at $35.30. It's been an eventful year so far for the company, as it opened 30 new stores and closed four. That gave it 755 locations before it completed a deal to acquire rival Mattress Giant. The company said that sales in stores that have been open a minimum of a year went up 16.1%. Despite the setbacks, MFRM still expects full year profits of $1.46 to $1.50 per share, up from $1.40 to $1.48 per share, and revenue of $1.03 billion to $1.06 billion. Revenue from Mattress Giant stores is expected to be $90 million to $95 million.