Thursday, January 22, 2009

Who Put the Pea in Sealy's Mattress?


During the fourth quarter, Sealy Corp (ZZ-$2.05) successfully amended its credit agreement to increase the maximum leverage ratio under its financial covenants. The amendment increased the maximum permitted leverage ratio of total debt to EBITDA to 5.85 times through the third quarter of 2009; then stepping down to 5.50 times through the second quarter of 2010. Nonetheless, with the company not expecting to see year-over-year sales comps improvement until the second half of 2009, the bedding manufacturer might still trip up its debt covenants…. Read More….

"…the old Queen went into the bedroom, took all the bed clothes off and laid a pea on the bedstead: then she took twenty mattresses and piled them on top of the pea, and then twenty feather beds on top of the mattresses. This was where the princess was to sleep that night. In the morning they asked her how she slept.

'Oh terribly bad!' said the princess. 'I have hardly closed my eyes the whole night! Heaven knows what was in the bed. I seemed to be lying upon some hard thing, and my whole body is black and blue this morning. It is terrible!'

They saw at once that she must be a real princess when she had felt the pea through twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds. Nobody but a real princess could have such a delicate skin." ~ "The Princess and the Pea," by Hans Christian Andersen

2 comments:

mattress said...

Very interesting story, it must be old indeed if it reflects such naive view about blue blooded people.

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