Just take a trip to your local grocery store and see how many water bottle brands there are, selling the exact same product that you get for free out of your faucet at home.
In my corner of Europe the cool kids from the business course all start some sort of bottled drink company. Getting picked up by the big supermarket chain is always commemorated with cringe LinkedIn posts.
I was at a local event my city was hosting and the only water option was Liquid Death. It felt criminal to charge as much as they did for water in a fancy can, but I wasn’t going to order soda just so I could feel like I’m paying for something. It was probably 2 years ago and I’m still bothered by it.
The world needs less of this, not more.
I’ve been to a couple cities in Europe that were very proud of their water. Hotels and restaurants advertised that they served tap water, and the bottled water was proudly bottled tap water. There were filling stations around town to get more of this water for free. I want more of this, and less Liquid Death. Invest in the local water supply, not marketing companies with the laziest product possible.
Where I live (Tacoma WA if anyone wants some) there are wellheads you can go to and get water for free. I use it for brewing beer (because of the mineral content). I've never seen anyone else filling. I was curious so I asked, and they measure how much water people take and it's only in the hundreds of gallons a month per wellfield. There has to be over 200,000 people within five miles of one of these wellheads.
I was in Lithuania recently and apparently they pump ground water directly into the city water system without any filtration. It's that clean, and it tastes amazing. Gotta watch out for old soviet pipes, tho.
