It’s also more like 300%. Restaurants have a 300% markup or a 70% margin on their food.
But it comes in a bottle that’s clean, cold, ready to use and fits in my cup holder and when I’m done with it I can put it in any garbage or recycling bin in the world and it gets dealt with free of charge. For anywhere between 25¢ and $2, that’s not bad.
It really bugs me when people go all off the rails about bottled water and talk about how stupid it is. Well, some people really like the convenience. I don’t want to carry a clunky water bottle around with me. I don’t want to wash a reusable water bottle every few days. I don’t want to take a sip of water only to find out it’s been sitting in my car and now it’s hot (or frozen solid).
I’d rather just be leaving and grab a bottle. When it’s done, I toss the empty and grab another. If I were to buy a bottle a day at 25¢, it would be $90 a year. I can afford that for the convenience of a fresh, cold bottle of water each day and not having to clean up after my self (saving recycling the bottle).
Why not go all nuts after the person who goes out to the diner every morning for eggs and coffee? He could make that at home for a fraction of the cost. What about the person who dries a Porsche or Land Rover? They could get a very nice car that cost $25,000 less then those and still be driving in luxury.
Everybody likes to spend their money on something, I don’t see why people feel the need to tell others how stupid they are for spending their’s on bottled water. I’d be willing to bet, for every person that tells someone else they should be using a reusable water bottle and (filtered) tap water, there’s something that person is doing that other people would consider a giant waste as well. Driving a car that doesn’t get 40+mpg? Have drafty windows? Use disposable diapers instead of cloth? Maybe don’t recycle when it isn’t convenient all the time?
But for some reason, the bottled water thing, is the what a lot of people like to get on their high horse about. I don’t know if it’s because the math is easy. Look ma! I can multiply. Well, maybe don’t use the gas station as a reference point. Or if it’s because they hear fun facts that they can repeat like “Did you know that bottled water is more expensive then gas/beef/a car by weight?” Again, anything is expensive you find the most expensive source and use that as a reference point. That’s like me saying I got an a bagel at a restaurant once and it was $2.00, therefore a 10 pack at the grocery store must be $20 and that’s why it’s a giant waste of money to eat those things. Did you know that if you gave up your bagel every day, you could drive from LA to NY almost 4 times with the money you’d save!. Wait, even better, you could buy almost 3000 bottles of water! Enough to have 8 bottles a day. See how that math gets weird when you use bad numbers (the restaurant cost for a bagel vs the cheapest cost for water and the mileage on a hybrid car).
That’s what the OP did. He found the most expensive bottled water. $2.00 a pint. The only way you pay $2.00 a pint is to buy it at a gas station or a restaurant or get a boutique type brand like Fiji and then compared that cost to the absolute cheapest source the non-commercial homeowner can get their hands on. An unlimited amount, delivered to their house with no transportation costs and a HUGE volume discount. It’s the difference between buying a single bagel at a restaurant and backing a truck into the manufacturer’s plant and asking for a good price on a year’s supply of them and finding out they’ll sell them to you for 25¢ if you pick them up at their door, and they can sell them to you, unboxed, no labels, no bags, just a truckload of bagels.
Alright, that’s enough for now.
Also, I was at Sams today, they had water on sale. It was $5.49 for 24/700ml. That’s about 16¢ per pint.
