Seltzer boys*

Over the last couple of years, I’ve become something of a seltzer kind of gal. I was generally drinking a (small) can of Diet Coke each day, when I came to realization that there really isn’t anything in Diet Coke that’s good for you. And likely stuff in it that’s not good for you. So I started drinking more water. (I keep three bottles – old wine bottles – in full of tap water in my fridge. The one to the right, I have been known to guzzle directly out of, so anyone bothering to look in my kitchen on a hot day has likely seen me guzzling what looks to be white wine, directly from the bottle, while standing there with the fridge door open.)

But once I went cold turkey on Diet Coke, I found myself missing having something fizzy. So I started stocking seltzer. Specifically, Polar Raspberry Lime and LaCroix Orange.

The LaCroix, which comes in an 8-pack, is actually easier to lug from the store than is the 12-pack of Polar. But Polar brings out the Worcester girl, the locavore, in me, so I’d rather have Worcester’s own Polar. Which means backpacking the 12-pack in every couple of weeks (preferably Raspberry Lime, but if the Roche Bros are out, I’ll go with the Cranberry Lime or Grapefruit).

I go to the grocery store a few times a week, so it’s not that big a deal to devote one of those trips to a soda-lug and whatever I can carry in my tote bags. But it’s admittedly a (literal) drag to schlepp a 12-pack of soda home.

Apparently I’m not the only shopper-without-a-car who doesn’t like the lug. So entrepreneurs Garth Goldwater and George Mayorga (who make their living developing apps for companies) have come up with a solution to this “problem.”

One day, Mayorga, a self-proclaimed seltzer fanatic, was walking back to his office from the grocery store schlepping cases of the bubbly beverage in his arms, after the pair had depleted their supply.

Suddenly, annoyance set in.

“I was on the phone with Garth and I had four cases of seltzer in my hand,” he said. “And I was just telling him how much of a pain it was to do that.”

He figured others have experienced the same predicament. So they came up with a plan: Eliminate the hassle of trying to muscle boxes of seltzer around, or the frustration of running out, by launching a “milkman”-style delivery service for the fizzy drinks. (Source: Boston Globe)

Well, this isn’t quite as useless an idea as the one from a few years ago: delivering rolls of quarters to folks who needed them for the laundromat. (Not surprisingly, Washboard, which I wrote about in Washboard Abs(urd), folded.) But I can’t for the life of me see why someone who wanted their soda delivered wouldn’t just get it delivered by the delivery wing of their grocery stores.

Anyway, their new company, Ultra Seltzer, is now a thing. And I’ve got to say that, when it comes to seltzer, they’ve got good taste. They carry all of my fav flavs. Still…

The service is $15 per month, and Ultra Seltzer doesn’t charge customers until the seltzer is actually dropped at a person’s doorstep.

Well, that’s all well and good. But, ummm… If I ordered three six-dollar 12-packs a month, each would bear an additional five-dollar tariff from the service fee. That’s a lot of overhead. Even when your sodas are being delivered by a guy wearing a white milkman uniform of yore. (IRL, our milkmen when I was growing up didn’t wear white. They wore striped bibbed overalls. And they didn’t wear caps, either.The guys who pumped gas did, but not the milkmen. But when milkmen of yore are represented, they’re in white.

Of course, the zany concept, which the duo admits was somewhere between a joke and a fantasy job, already has its critics.

No surprise there. What’s more surprising is that there are some folks who’ve already signed on.

Heather McCormack was an early adopter. She saw the query Goldwater and Mayorga posted on Reddit and was immediately intrigued.

“A lot of the Reddit board was roasting them and saying it wasn’t plausible. But there was also a contingent that said, ‘This is exactly what I’ve always wanted. Please and thank you,’” she said. “There’s a dedicated community out there that’s really into seltzer — not just casually into seltzer — and I think there’s enough of those people in the Boston area alone to make it work.”

Sally Schofield also decided to take a chance on it.

The 32-year-old Boston resident lives on the fifth floor of her apartment building and doesn’t have a car. As a “seltzer enthusiast,” she loathes lugging cases of the drink upstairs every time she makes a trip to the grocery store.

“I don’t usually sign up for these type of bourgeois services,” she said, but “there are certain inconveniences that are worth paying to get rid of.”

Who knows? It’s not like I’m any good at figuring out what’s going to take off and what’s not. When Twitter started out, I figured it would be used by celebrities to communicate with there fans. And that was about it. Today, Twitter is my first news source of the day.

Anyway, just thinking about this as a viable business makes my head hurt.

Think I’ll go break open a can of Polar Raspberry Lime.

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*Seltzer Boys is an illusion that will be obscure to anyone who wasn’t around in the early 1960’s listening to parody-singer Allan Sherman. His song “Seltzer Boy” was a take off on “Water Boy.”