Bottled Water...EXPENSIVE!
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Liquid Assets: America’s Expensive Love Affair With Bottled Water..
Paying for something you can get for free, or close to free, would seem to be positively un-American. But with one product, it happens all the time — every day, over and over, to the tune of $21 billion a year.
Water.
In 2009, wholesale sales of bottled water in the U.S. amounted to $10.6 billion, according to the International Bottled Water Association (see the chart on page 11). Factor in a 100 percent markup, and Americans spent about $21 billion in 2009 on bottled water, laying out "more on Poland Spring, FIJI Water, Evian, Aquafina and Dasani than we spent buying iPhones, iPods and all the music and apps we loaded on them," writes Charles Fishman, author of the smart, intensively reported book The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water. The volume of sales — 8.45 billion gallons in 2009 — amounts to 27 gallons per American per year.
In 2009, the U.S. was the largest market for bottled water in the world, with Mexico, China, Brazil, Italy and Indonesia rounding out the top six. The difference, of course, is that those other big consumers are generally poor, developing economies that lack the infrastructure and resources to deliver potable water to its citizens. (The exception is Italy, in which, if I'm not mistaken, regulations require every citizen to purchase several bottles of fizzy San Pellegrino each week.) In poor countries, buying bottled water is a necessity, a matter of health.
In the U.S., by contrast, pretty much every home, public workplace, restaurant, institution and school has a faucet that dispenses potable water. Sure, there are some places where the tap water comes out slightly discolored (for fear of retribution from real estate agents, I won't name the places along Florida's Atlantic Coast where I've seen yellowish effluent from faucets). And occasionally, the refreshing stream at the ancient drinking fountain in the public park may have rusty overtones. But overwhelmingly, free water safely slakes our collective thirst. As Fishman writes, "The United States has among the safest, most closely monitored water systems in the world, a tap water system that is responsible in part for the extraordinary leaps in lifespan in the United States in the last hundred years."Source: Yahoo Finance
