It might seem odd, that we wail over the gallon price of gasoline. Here in my neighborhood, it was $3.39 a gallon for regular unleaded. Yikes.
Mackenzie Carpenter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has put together a great piece about the price gouging, not of gasoline, but bottled water. If you're spending $1.49 for a tiny 9-ounce bottle of Evian, that's $21a gallon! It's all put into perspective with gallon prices for Snapple, Pepto-Bismol, and Aquafina, which is just filtered...tap water.
The article is a good read as it points out that tap water, for the most part, is completely safe to drink. Adidtionally, most people already get enough water through the food and beverages they consume throughout the day. Perhaps the bottled water companies have created all this hype about dehydration.
The best part of the article, however, is a cost comparison of filtration systems (annualized) like Brita and Pur. It's not cheap, but certainly less expensive than buying single servings of bottled water.
5-18-2006 @6:16PM Finished.Law.School said... I think gas is about $0.12 per gallon in Venezuela...
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5-18-2006 @6:51PM Rob Brooks-Bilson said... Out here in Phoenix, bottled water is more about two other factors, taste and staying hydrated, than it is about water quality.
When I lived back East, I drank tap water and almost never drank bottled water. In AZ, it's another story. Tap water tastes absolutely terrible in many places. Most people either get a water filtration system for their house, or water coolers with 5 gallon bottles.
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5-18-2006 @7:45PM James said... Evian = Naive spelled backwards = the people that buy it.
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5-18-2006 @11:56PM extramsg said... Another one of those lame stories that should be on Fox's local news cast because they don't have anything better to cover than mis-guided stats.
People don't buy bottled because they think it's safer or because they think they need 10 glasses of water a day. These are tertiary reasons, if reasons at all.
People buy bottled water because it's convenient and tastes better.
If people just wanted safer water and more of it, they could buy gallon jugs of water at any grocery store for less than $1.50 a gallon. (And I've never spent $1.50 for 9 oz of water; I buy Aquafina, which was rated one of the better tasting waters, and it's usually about $1-$1.50 a liter.)
Putting water through a Brita or Pur filter is annoying and you can't take it with you. You can't take a tap filter with you either. I have filtered water on my refrigerator, which I use all the time at home, but I still buy bottled water when I'm out and about.
Hell, maybe water should be more expensive than gasoline because it's so important. We think of it as a free resource and tend to waste it. But it's one of the most important resources on earth and yet one of the cheapest in this country.
The truth is that water prices are set by supply and demand and a buck here and there for a bottle of water is no big deal for most people in this country. We should just be grateful that unlike many other countries, poor people can have as much clean water as they need or want whenever they want.
People should just be happy that bottled water buyers are drinking water, not soda, juice, snapple, etc, that contributes so many empty calories to a diet.
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5-19-2006 @12:12AM Crosius said... Most bottled water is produced by soft-drink companies. They prefer to sell you soda, because of the subsidies attached to sugar in the USA.
They price bottled water to make you consider the soda elsewhere in the cooler.
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5-19-2006 @4:03AM James said... Aquafina tastes like plastic to me. Dasani still tastes way better than Aquafina. Personally I still prefer Earth2O.
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5-19-2006 @10:38AM Kevin Donahue said... I'm not sure I'd call the Post-Gazette piece great. I think lazy would be the correct term, as almost all of the numbers come from a chain-email.
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5-19-2006 @11:01PM James said... Just found this video about using water as fuel in cars.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImGaraPrEo8
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5-22-2006 @4:44AM Fran Stirrup said... Cooled Water are a Hampshire based company providing water coolers throughout the UK. We specialise in low cost fixed price packages, regular water delivery and cooler sanitisation. Providing refreshment for your staff and clients.
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