The Astros might have won it all, but Houston's "Mattress Mack" lost quite a lot because of it.
Thanks to the team's victory in Game 7 of the World Series, Gallery Furniture owner Jim McIngvale had to pay out $10 million to fans who had purchased mattresses this year. Back in June, McIngvale ran a promotion in which he promised to refund customers that spent $3,000 on mattresses in his store if the Astros won the World Series.
Well, it happened, and now there are plenty of people in Houston going to sleep very happily on those mattresses.
Luckily for Mattress Mack, his confidence in the team led him to taking some precautions to cover himself just in case the team captured their first-ever World Series title, according to ESPN.
[McIngvale] said he paid an insurance premium of between 10 and 20 percent of the total value of what he had to pay out. In order to balance his risk out more, he placed some bets in Las Vegas on the Astros. Those bets, he said, totaled north of $1 million on the Astros to win the World Series.
McIngvale says that his stores still made money off the bet, citing additional business that the promotion brought in. So it appears everyone is walking away winners here.
It's not the only act of generosity that the business owner had for Astros fans this season, either. McIngvale paid for nearly 100 Houston fans to attend Tuesday's Game 6, with 40 of them also receiving free tickets from Mattress Mack. (The others already had tickets.) The 'Stros may not have clinched in L.A. that night, but it was still a pretty cool gesture from the furniture mogul.
