Step right up, hey. You there! I got  a deal for ya’. The endcap down at the local Safeway (but really, it could be any store, anywhere)… 3 cases of bottled water for $10.00. That’s 72 bottles at 500ml each, for a single thin sawbuck. 36 liters of water total, comes in about 28 cents a liter. Now, that is a bargain compared to the single-bottle price, but why should we compare it to that? Most bottled water is nothing more than tap water… let’s compare these apples to those apples, yes?.

How much more, per liter, are these plastic water bombs than the stuff that comes out of your tap? Well, the average cost for tap water is about $2 for 1000 gallons, which if I’ve done my ciphering right, means that its per liter cost works out to be about .05 cents. The 28-cents-a-liter cases on the endcap there work out to be about 560% more expensive than the stuff you have on tap at home. You’d have to be a special kind of credulous fool to fall for something like that, right?

And it gets better. That there “Refreshe” water is a Safeway product. Not to pick on Safeway but it turns out that they get this water from the municipal water supply in Merced, California. It’s city water, that the taxpayers pump out of the ground and that Safeway pays about $1,000 a month for, and chugs away with more than a million gallons of water in return. The retail cost for that much purified bottled water at Safeway is just under $3 million. That’s a return-on-investment that crack dealers and oil companies can only dream about.

How gullible are you?