Some of this is said above, but let me recap from some intense professional focus on the product and market. Bottled water has been around as a shelf product for a long timed, but I would bet that it was the mid-1980s or later before I saw individual bottles - as opposed to gallon jugs of drinking water - in a grocery store.
Bottled water is a staple in some ways. However, turning it into a brand-name, intensely-marketed and competitive product is a comparatively new phenomenon, 20 years old at most and getting crazier every year.
Water is water. It can’t possibly be better for having been trucked, shipped or flown from some far corner of the globe, let alone the next state over. That the market has fallen for the shuck that water from France or Fiji is “better” is bad enough; that they believe water from the local Coke plant is “better” and that varying brands are better and worser is just fuckin’ crazy.
Dasani was created by a Coke executive who was disturbed at the high consumption of sugared soft drinks. Well, yay for his sociomedical concern… but the fact that it enabled Coke to sell a bottle of filtered water at the same price as any of their soft drinks surely undercuts his position. A 1-liter bottle of Dasani at $1.25 costs 2500 times as much as tap water - and that’s if you even figure drinking water to have a cost, which in effect it does not.
(Residential water costs an average of $2.00 per thousand gallons, or around 0.05 cents per liter. If you figure that drinking and cooking water is less than 10% of most households’ usage, it essentially becomes a free product alongside the larger amount used for sanitary purposes.)
And let’s not even get into the carbon costs of shipping a heavy, heavy product around, when it is plentiful nearly everywhere it is delivered.
Just on observation - My Wife and I spent 3 weeks in Germany with a side trip to Austria just over a year ago.
We did all our traveling by train. In all those train stations, In all the museums and parks, I managed to fine ONE water fountain in Austria. None in Germany. Zilch, zippo. It was kind of aggravating. I often just want a sip.
I remember the “water cooler” at work. The bottled water crazy appears to be the logical next step, but the intense marketing is something to behold.
You gotta admit; taking something that is nearly free and ubiquitous in the US and turning it into a “market” is pure brilliance. Same can be said for selling space (self storage) and air (aroma-therapy), and salt ("our salt is healthier than the other guys’ salt).
Going back to the 60’s I remember a water bottle station in the grocery stores. One side was distilled water, the other was “drinking water” which was probably just tap water. They had cardboard gallon cartons for free and the water was 20 cents.
Then they had plastic jugs (not that common back then if I remember) and the deposit on the jug was double the cost of the water.
Outside the city limits lots of people had well water and it could taste like crap. So that’s one reason for buying bottles water.
I don’t recall ever seeing bottled water in a gas station until like the late 80’s.
The first instance that I can recall of seeing bottled water was when I went to Sweden in the late 60’s. Ramlösa has been on sale there since 1707 apparently.
I thought it was a joke at the time.
there was a BBC2 documentary that examined this…“foods that make billions.” (link below) though didn’t watch the episode on bottled water so I can’t give you an answer.
The series examined the history and open secrets of bottled water, breakfast cereal and yogurt. I imagine it’s on youtube or the torrent sites.
I can place Perrier in 1981 (at $7.50 for 7oz (?) at a bar in the Palace Hotel in SF.
When did they recall every drop of that crap? Somebody was cleaning a filter - with BENZENE, of all things, and didn’t quite finish the “rinse” cycle.
Worldwide recall.
I was kind of amazed to find no water fountains anywhere in British parks (which I saw a fair bit of, travelling with 3 primary school kids) on our recent trip to Europe … till I realised that of course it’s more problematic over there than in Australia - the pipes would freeze in winter.
I should think the same would apply to Austria and Germany too.
Yes, but the Robin Williams joke indicated that about 1979 Perrier was starting to establish themselves as the healthy drink of pretentious yuppies; by that time he could say “Perrier water” and everyone knew what he meant - funny green bottle of stuff allegedly from a pure spring in southern France, not your average tap water but something special to sip in your upscale name brand clothes and shoes.
Perrier took single-serving bottled water from an extreme niche market to fairly common over the late 1970’s and early 80’s, then lost their major edge when they couldn’t wash their bottles properly. That opened the door for competing brands to jump in.
(So what? They shipped millions of little green bottles to France to clean and refill? Or did they have the same crappy washers in plants all over the world and shipped carloads of water there?)
Captain Haddock in “The Calculus Affair” has a running joke over bottled mineral water as the only beverage available in a mythical middle-European country. that was in the 1940’s.
I remember the big shift to everyday bottled water happening around here (90 miles from Milwaukee) in 1993, during the Milwaukee cryptosporidium outbreak. According to the article linked below, it’s the largest documented waterborne disease outbreak in U.S. history. It seems like before that, nobody I knew drank bottled water. After that, everybody (but me) did. Even when the crisis was long over.