Bottled Water for Sale

January 28, 2004 - Water, Water Everywhere!

As we all know, drinking water has become big business. Not long ago you drank it from disposable Dixie cups right out of the faucet. For a while it was good enough to get it delivered to your door in big jugs. Reverse osmosis and other home filtration systems were good for a while too. But now, the only proper way to get water is from a bottle, preferably from a foreign country. Ordering tap water at restaurants is like getting red wine with fish!

Yesterday, the dedicated staff of edhat.com went water shopping – to see how much we could buy. Let it be known that the dedicated staff won’t be getting thirsty any time soon. We found many different kinds of water from all over the world – mountain spring, artesian, mineral, purified, natural, well, glacial, electrolyte enhanced, and sparkling. Most were combinations thereof. We found water from France, England, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, and the Fiji Islands. If you like “Made in the USA” water, you can get it from Oregon, New York, or California, We found one brand bottled in Las Vegas … lots of water there, eh?

For some reason water from Italy comes in glass bottles.

For the high price water, you often get detailed descriptions of where the water came from … kind of like Cabbage Patch adoption papers, only different.

Brightwater comes from “ancient aquifers in an isolated country”

Gerolsteiner is from a “hamlet known far and wide as a holiday center”

Fiji is protected by a “virgin ecosystem”

Esker also has virgin roots; it comes from “deep below 5,000 acres of virgin forest”

29 bottles of water on the wall, 29 bottles of water .... (use scroll bar to see them all)

Overall, we found 29 bottles of bottled water. Our complete shopping spree cost us $34.85 ($1.20 / bottle). It is not fair to compare prices because of the different sizes (as if the water and not the marketing determined the price), but the cheapest, once again, was Trader Joe’s Mountain Spring - $0.49 for 1.5 liters. The most expensive was Vittel at Gelson’s - $1.78 for 1.5 liters.

Two edhat.com subscribers correctly guessed 29. For the tiebreaker, one chose Fiji and the other SmartWater as the most expensive. At Trader Joe’s, Fiji sells for $1.69 while SmartWater sells for $1.49 (both 1.5 liters). So, DAnimal is the winner of the free movie passes. Maybe he could see Waterworld.

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