I heard about this one on NPR and I had to find out more about it on my own.
There’s a company (and by now, I’ll guess there’s at least one) that has tapped into a market dominated once by nursery school children and their teachers: Napping. That’s right, as a nation, we are so damn sleep deprived that MetroNaps believes it can make a fortune by giving us all a place to nap for twenty minutes or so.
They’re willing to let us nap anywhere: at work, in school, in airports, or at their franchised storefronts in North America and Europe. Frankly, they don’t care where we nap, so long as we do it in one of their state-of-the art napping pods. Aside from the franshised locations, they’re willing to lease out these pods to businesses and airports so employers can create their own napping rooms for their weary workforces. They’ve got lots of science on their site touting the increased productivity that comes from napping not to mention the dangers of overtired people driving, operating machinery, and blogging (OK, maybe not blogging).
As the parent of a young child, who works full-time, and goes to school one to two nights a week, all I can say is this: do you take VISA?
As a matter of fact they do. Napping passes start at $14 but volume discounts are available. MetroNaps claims busines is booming but a similar enterprise by another company recently failed at the Mall of America, although that company later claimed the ratio of tourists made that site a poor location. MetroNaps has its sights set on locations like NYC’s financial district, where they believe the walking weary are in abundant supply.