Kramer is officially unemployed for the entire run of Seinfeld. He has no visible source of income, no conventional career, and no apparent interest in acquiring either. What he has instead is an endless supply of ideas — business ventures, schemes, and projects that arrive fully formed and are pursued with total commitment for as long as it takes for them to collapse, which is usually one episode.
Here are his ten greatest ventures, ranked by ambition, comedy, and the particular quality of inspired impracticality that makes Kramer one of television's great dreamers.
Kramer's plan to revive the rickshaw as a viable Manhattan transportation option — pulling passengers through the streets of New York — is one of his most purely physical ventures. The plan is impractical, dangerous, and entirely consistent with Kramer's belief that solutions to problems are usually obvious if you are willing to think outside conventional frameworks.
Kramer wants to bottle the smell of the ocean. Not a synthetic approximation — the actual smell. He pursues this with the full weight of his conviction that the world needs exactly this product and that he is the person to provide it. The venture does not progress far, but it captures something essential about Kramer: his business ideas are always rooted in something real that he finds genuinely compelling.
In The Couch (Season 6), Kramer invests in a pizza restaurant where customers make their own pies. The concept is sound — interactive dining experiences would become a real industry trend. Kramer is simply ahead of his time, and the venture fails for reasons that have more to do with execution than vision.
In The Muffin Tops (Season 8), Kramer launches a bus tour of New York City sites related to J. Peterman — or rather, related to the stories Elaine wrote for J. Peterman's catalogue, which were drawn from the lives of the people around her. The tour is fictional but the tourists don't know that, which is fine because the stories are good. Kramer as tour guide is one of Michael Richards's finest physical performances.
Kramer's beach smell concept recurs across multiple episodes, suggesting that this is not a passing enthusiasm but a genuine obsession. The idea that an evocative smell could be commercialised is not wrong — the fragrance industry is built on exactly this premise. Kramer's failure to bring it to market is a failure of resources rather than vision.
In The Ex-Girlfriend (Season 2 — though the book is pitched in later seasons), Kramer's idea for a coffee table book about coffee tables — which, crucially, folds out into an actual coffee table — is genuinely brilliant. It is self-referential, useful, and commercially plausible. At least one publisher reportedly considered it seriously after the episode aired.
In The Pool Guy (Season 7), Kramer gets a phone number that is one digit off from Moviefone and decides to simply become Moviefone — answering calls and providing showtime information himself. The scheme works until it doesn't, at which point Kramer tries to bluff his way through film information he does not have. It is one of the show's finest single-episode ventures.
Kramer's proposal to create a smoking lounge inside a pet store — where dog owners could smoke with their dogs — is one of his most conceptually unusual ideas. The premise — that dogs should be able to share their owners' habits — has a kind of internal logic that is pure Kramer. The scheme does not survive contact with reality but that was never really the point.
In The Merv Griffin Show (Season 9), Kramer does not so much launch a business venture as recreate an entire television studio in his apartment. He finds the set of The Merv Griffin Show in a dumpster and installs it, then begins conducting interviews with his guests as if he is hosting a talk show. The venture has no commercial dimension whatsoever, which is what makes it his purest expression of creative energy.
In The Bottle Deposit (Season 7), Kramer and Newman devise a plan to drive a mail truck full of empty bottles from New York to Michigan, where the deposit refund is ten cents rather than New York's five cents. The scheme is mathematically plausible and logistically disastrous in ways neither of them anticipates. It is Kramer's greatest venture because it combines the genuine business insight (price arbitrage exists) with the spectacular failure of execution that defines him. Newman pursues a mail truck across multiple states. Things catch fire. It is perfect.