Have you guys heard about this place in New York that’ll sell you tap water for $2.50 because the guy puts it through a filter?

He’s not even saying the water’s from an artesian well or France or something. He’s just saying, “Hey, come over here. I got a giant Brita pitcher.”

Maybe I don’t understand. I do have access to the nation’s cleanest tap water. Apparently in New York, the streets are littered with the bodies of people who drank the toxic slime that pours from their primitive faucets. Maybe one of the toxins is the reason they can’t pronounce the letter R.

I don’t fault the owner for trying. He’s the only tap water retailer in all of New York. He’s captured 100 percent of the market! In fact, I briefly flirted with the idea of renting the place next door, hooking up a hose outside and offering to spray people down for the half the price.

But I’d hate to lose money by over-saturating the market. Instead, here’s my idea: I’m going to start selling air.

Sure, there are outfits that sell oxygen. The price of helium has sky-rocketed. But you really don’t have any options if you just want to head down to the corner store and buy yourself a breath of fresh air.

The start-up costs would be low. I’d just have to buy a bunch of Tupperware containers and find a reliable source of argon [more on that in a moment].

The key is to entice the target audience with a strong branding effort.

When you enter my fresh air bistro, there will be a bunch of plants and an Air Genius who will explain to you that the air has been acquired through a proprietary process he cannot explain [I’ll spend several hours a day going out into the park with some Tupperware and waving it through the air and then shutting the container really tight].

If you just want air, that’s great, but for only two dollars more, you can get your air mixed with a shot of any of the most exotic noble gases mined in the remote mountains of Chile: argon for energy, xenon for focus, neon for… I don’t know, joint pain, I guess.

The Air Genius will then discuss the air mixing process and gesture toward the back of the store where a little old man, perhaps from Vienna, sits with a visor and one of those jeweler’s lenses. It’ll look like he’s crafting each air molecule with loving care. He’ll actually be reading a racing form.

The marketing strategy itself is more complicated. My first instinct was to devise an homage to the old-timey traveling salesmen of yesteryear:

My concern is that the target audience will be the disposable income-rich hipster doofus market and I don’t think they enjoy whimsy. They enjoy some sort of minimalist approach that’s too cool to tell you anything about the product. The finished logo will likely look more like this:

With a business plan like that, nothing can stop me from cornering the artisan-air market! Soon, I’ll own a monocle and grow a bushy, white mustache!

A quick aside: When I loaded this entry into our server, I noticed I had already written a blog with this exact title about two years ago. It’s an homage to this Saturday Night Live skit. I thought about changing it, but everybody runs repeats during the summer.