Sure, they do, after overthrowing an elected government that was led by the aforementioned descendants of the Indian contract laborers and changing the constitution to give most of the land to the native Fijians and, later, ensuring that “Indian Fijians can only have less than half of all seats in parliament and banned Indians from the post of prime minister.” So it’s sounding less like a native-led paradise and more like Uganda under Idi Amin.
Made my morning…
[nitpick]
I know of quite a few instances where I do give a shit where my water comes from. Every time I deploy to an airbase overseas (and this goes for Army and Marine bases as well), our water is shipped in from the outside if we can’t provide it for ourselves. Since we don’t want anyone poisoning our troops, we have medical personnel randomly test our bottled water.
For costs and availability already mentioned in this thread, when practical (and safe), that bottled water is purchased from the local economy–a lot comes from Doha, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia. . . whatever. It costs Uncle $am a few bucks, but it meets the population’s demand for safe drinking water.
[/nitpick]
Because I’d been inundated with cheap, plain, bottled water, I hate the crap and refuse to drink the shit. I do love Fruit 2-0 and some of the flavored, carbonated generic brands, but I won’t pay a red cent for the plain shit. By God, if I’m gonna spend 50-cents for a bottle of water, I better be paying for either flavor, burps, or both. :mad:
Tripler
. . . sometimes I have this revolutionary idea: I drink tap water. [sub]Mostly for some of the reasons I nod my head to the piece linked to by Brown Eyed Girl[/sub]
Clearly, the wine snobs are branching out.
Are there any Federal regulation of waters? I mean, can I add 1% real Fiji H2O to my local tap water, then bottle it and sell it as “FIJI WATER”? lots of products get away with this …like the “KONA Coffee”-that turns out to be a “blend”-with maybe 5% Kona beans-or the “BLUE MOUNTAIN” coffee-that is mostly cheap coffe beans?
I find the whole bottled water thing ridiculous-how about Norwegian “VOSS” water-$4.00/liter!
I was there in '98, and it wasn’t as simple as you’re making it out even then.
I don’t know from laws, but have you seen Penn & Teller’s Bullshit show where they use a wine steward in a fancy restaurant to push, among other brands, Piss De Chat? And the patrons like it? And all of their fancy waters are from the same source, the garden hose?
Geez, I link to Fast Company articles so much you’d think I was being paid. But anyways, this one was good, and covered the Fiji water in detail:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle.html
More of a status thing, really. It’s not that you can afford to spend $40 for something to drink, it’s that you are rolling in so much dough, you don’t think twice about spending that much for a bottle of … WATER! :eek:
Excellent article. Very enlightening.
This comment from the CEO of the largest bottled water company in the US is a classic:
Is there something he thinks, but doesn’t want to say, about his consumers?
“I feel like a goddamn snake oil salesman! You people will seriously buy anything!”
Except that there is a massive difference between a £3 and a £30 bottle of wine and virtually no difference between waters - the only time I buy bottled is if I am out and about and not near a tap.
Seriousley though, selling ‘Piss de Chat’ and nobody said anything? Are you sure they weren’t serving it to people who’d recently been lobotomized?
True, but the people who pay a $1.25 to a vending machine for a half liter of water (when there’s a water fountain ten feet away) probably aren’t looking for status. I think it’s a combination of the myth that everyone should drink eight cups of water a day, oral fixation, dieting trends and the idea that free public water is somehow not “pure.” The whole “purity” thing is the major emphasis of bottled water marketing.
People should realize that municipal water systems are highly regulated, while bottled water is hardly regulated at all. In most cases (in the U.S.), bottled water has more contaminants than municipal water.
As the article referenced by SmackFu says,
(Why are New Yorkers excepted?)
I filter my drinking water with a Brita thing, because I don’t like the chlorine, but even that is just psychological. (It makes me think I’m drinking pool water.) Well, actually, I don’t mind the chlorine when I’m out of the house; if I’m biking up a steep hill in Griffith Park in summer heat, the water fountain is great, simply because it’s there. Like hell I’m going to buy any bottled water of any brand.
It’s all marketing–to suck in the dollars of a nation that likes to waste its money on stupid things when it should be saving its money, and not buying houses they can’t afford.
Mabye someday cities in the industrialized world could use a system where they have some kind of reservoirs that hold water, and some sort of filtration system to purify the water, and then a network of pipes going right into houses, businesses and apartment buildings, that actually carry the water right to where people live and work. Sure, it would a huge expense to lay down that kind of infrastructure, and I don’t even know where you’d get the literally miles of pipe you’d need, but it could be done – and my hunch is that someday, it could actually make obsolete our current system of transporting water in millions of small plastic bottles loaded on trucks and trains.
Okay, I’m a dreamer; this is pie-in-the-sky, “World of Tomorrow!” stuff. But it could happen.
If you say it in French (everything sounds better in French), put a flowery, fancy label on it, have it served it in a fancy restaurant by a “water steward” where he recommends it from a fancy water list, presents the bottle before opening with a flourish, pours it into a fancy wine glass, and you swirl it around ever so gently to let the bouquet emerge…
Yes, it’s all in the presentation. The diners liked it better than some other waters. The ones with the other labels and names, but from the same garden hose that they didn’t know about.
To be fair, someone in such a circumstance may be buying the bottled water because he plans to drink it elsewhere, and, as many of us do, plan to refill it from the water fountain (which aren’t very portable).
I do occasionally buy bottled water when I want a bottle to refill. I have an Evian one next to me now that I’ve had for about a month, and one in my car, and one by my bed. I have taken to ignoring the company water cooler too, as the tap water is absolutely fine.
To add to my previous post about Piss De Chat, from the bottled water link above:
You have a point there. If you forget your water bottle, then you might want to buy one like that. Also, after time, I believe, things in the plastic can leech into the water, so you don’t want to use the same bottle forever.
If I have any choice, though, I’ll buy a gatorade from the supermarket; at least I’m getting something for my money, though not much.