Some of my friends, on the other hand, have the opposite problem.  One of my best friends can hardly sleep a whole night through because she wakes up so easily.  On top of it all, her neighbor parks in front of her house and idles his really loud Volkswagen bus.

My mom suffers from insomnia — she has a hard time falling asleep because she starts thinking and worrying, and she wakes up easily as well.  I don’t know how I got so lucky as to miss out on that gene!

My dad, on the other hand, I rather suspect suffers from some sleep apnea.  He snores a lot at night, and when the snoring stops at intervals, I wonder if it’s because he’s stopped breathing altogether for a moment.  He would probably benefit quite a bit from a CPAP machine, also known as a sleep apnea machine, which keeps the person’s airway open so that they don’t stop breathing at night.

When I hear about all these people with sleep disorders, I am so glad that my biggest problem is sleeping TOO much.  Hey, it make running my own business somewhat challenging when I sleep in, but I’ll take that any day over not getting enough sleep!

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But last year a national furniture store chain opened up in town and the competition started to get fierce.  For the first time in ten years, I was seeing our sales start to decrease.  I knew that they had lower prices than we did, but I didn’t want to end up in a price war that I wouldn’t be able to win – I knew there had to be another way for us to keep our market share.

My wife came up with the great idea that we could offer accessibility seating to our customers.  There was no one in town that sold lift recliners or other accessibility seating options.  I found out that some of our suppliers had stock of these types of products, so we brought some in to try them out.

Six months later, we have gained market share and are testing out new products to sell in our store.  So far the response to the walk-in bath tubs that has been phenomenal and we are looking to bring in even more options for our customers.  I will have to give all the credit to my wife though – she did have a really good idea.

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