With 5 minutes 1 second remaining, the margin had grown to 26 points.
By Saturday, all but the absentee ballots from that one district and about 1,000 other paper ballots had been officially counted and Ms. Krueger's margin had grown from 151 on election night to the current 346.
Sleep America carries lower margins has grown substantially in recent periods due to an agreement to place Sleep Number mattresses in Radisson Hotels over the next several years.
The question is why: If profit margins have grown so fat, why aren't some lenders trying to win business by offering lower prices?
Its operating margins have grown to 6.2percentt in the latest half-year, and 18 of its models are profitable now, up from 4 in 1999.
Don's margins have grown so small that on three occasions he has had to put his savings into the Apothecary Shoppe in order to keep the doors open.
"In these soft years for stocks, where margins have grown very thin, trading volume has become the lifeblood of the brokerage business," said Matt Samelson, principal at Woodbine Associates, a capital markets consulting and research firm.
Mr Batchelor reckons that, after stripping out the cost of litigation, MasterCard's operating margins have grown by about 2% a year for the past five years and will continue to expand, if more slowly.Some analysts are much less optimistic.
Mr. Bloomberg, a former bond trader, considers the bonuses a reward for hard work and successful results: as his election-night victory margins have grown, as they did from 2001 to 2005, so have the checks he writes to his staff.
