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Savvy Entrepreneurs Tackle the Obesity Problem
Swimming the Hudson Produces Fewer Drownings than Expected
Alarm about America's obesity epidemic is presenting opportunities for entrepreneurs to cash in on fat angst. Here's a sampling of some new initiatives.
Commuting from New Jersey to Manhattan
Aquatic Commute offers a service in which New York commuters swim across the Hudson River instead of driving across on the George Washington bridge. Since it began the service in mid-April, the roster of customers has grown from four people on the first day to more than 1,500 a day as of the end of August. "An entrepreneur's wet dream" raved an article in The Times reporting on the service's instant success.
Instead of driving onto the bridge, commuters take a ramp to a parking lot under the bridge beside the Hudson. They change into swimming togs in dressing rooms in trailers and take to the water. Aquatic Commute offers wetsuits, goggles and swim fins to its customers for an extra fee. The commuter's clothes, briefcase and other possessions are ferried by automobile over the bridge and are waiting at trailer-based dressing rooms on the Manhattan side of the river.
After showering and dressing - and warming up for those who skipped the wet suit option - commuters are transported to midtown Manhattan via a fleet of Chevrolet Suburbans equipped with the new salad bar option. Instead of salads, the commuters are offered all-you-can-eat gourmet breakfasts that feature omelets cooked-to-order by an onboard chef. Aquatic Commute executives say the unlimited breakfast is a big draw, since most swimmers emerge from the water with massive appetites.
Although some critics have wondered aloud whether the 5,000 calorie breakfasts most of the commuters eat might offset any thinning benefits of the swim, Aquatic Commute executives say that some "incredible weight-loss success stories" have emerged after six months in business.
The company also says it is pleasantly surprised by the low fatality rate among customers so far. During the first 14 weeks in business, only 17 people who set out from New Jersey failed to reach Manhattan. Of these, 13 bodies have been recovered and four are missing and presumed drowned. "We knew there would be some fatalities," an Aquatic Commute executive said. "But slightly more than one drowning a week is quite encouraging."
Texas Children
The children of Texas are the chubbiest in the country. Texas is also the place where the Chevrolet Suburban is the state automobile. Anyone who is halfway serious about being a Texan must drive a Suburban.
That's prompted General Motors to offer a built-in salad bar as an option for Texas-bound Suburbans. The bars, which have to be factory installed and add $11,000 to the Suburban's already hefty $40,000-plus price tag, have been flying off the factory floor, so to speak. Texans want the bars and they want them now.
The salad bar runs along one side of the vehicle and seats face the bar. So passengers actually ride sideways. Chevy dealers say passengers don't mind, since almost all of them are fixated on the bar's offerings and spend most of their time while driving somewhere either filling their plates at the bar, emptying the plates into their mouths while seated, or standing in line waiting to fill their plates yet again.
As an added incentive, Chevrolet has given dealers exclusive franchises to supply the salads for the Suburban bars. For an extra charge, a Suburban owner can subscribe to GM's Onstar satellite system that allows a vehicle's occupants to talk to a control center to request roadside assistance or help with other problems. A salad bar Suburban's call to Onstar brings delivery of new salads within 30 minutes, via helicopter.
Delaware Canal
One of the most intriguing fat fighting endeavors is the use of an old barge canal that runs alongside the Delaware River on the Pennsylvania side from Easton to Bristol. In the first half of the 20th Century, mules pulled barges loaded with cargo along the canal. Now, people who want to shed pounds alternately pull a barge along the canal and then sit on the barge while fellow passengers pull them.
Barging All Pounds operates from April 1 through November 1. Its customers range from people who use the barges daily just like a fitness club to vacationers who charter a barge and spend a leisurely week pulling one another from one end of the canal to the other and overnighting in local bed and breakfasts. Barge races have also become popular among certain younger fitness buffs.
The barges, smaller than those in the last century, float on pontoons and have open decks with benches. Each passenger wears a harness that hooks into ropes attached to several points on the barge. A coxswain calls a cadence and decides when someone seated on the barge must swap places with someone of the tow path.
Everyone using the barges - tourist, daily workout fanatic or the frenetic barge racers - must cope with the fact that the canal locks no longer work. So at each lock Bearing All Pounds' customers must lift their barge from the canal, carry it around the lock and put it back in the canal before resuming the journey.
Although Barging All Pounds requires that its customer provide a letter from a doctor certifying a sufficient level of fitness to pull the barges, the company's customers still suffer an average of one cardiovascular or cerebral vascular "incident" per week. So far, none of its customers have died in harness, the firm reports, though in two cases a barge pulling session led to emergency open heart surgery.
Copyright 2003-2004 William Stockton & Smithtown Creek Productions
All Rights Reserved
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