Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-07-31 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

I am standing in the beverage aisle of a local supermarket the other day, a place where people come to quench their thirst. They do this with Pepsi-Cola, with 7Up, with Coca-Cola and Sprite. As everybody knows, such liquids can seem like the nectars of the gods on a hot summer day. But I am standing here with a different kind of thirst. I am thirsty for understanding. And I am feeling pretty parched.

I am staring at oceans of bottled water. These are flying off of shelves like the tide going out every day, and who knows why? They are flying so fast that we now have statistics declaring that 8 billion gallons of bottled water are sold in America each year, and the competition is so ferocious that the industry spends $158 million on advertising to convince the thirsty among us that one brand of water is better than some other brand of water.

I cannot imagine how precious and sophisticated one’s taste buds must be to make this distinction meaningful at such prices.

For here is something called Aquafina, which sells for about 30 cents for a little 16-ounce bottle, in bulk. Here is Aqua Pool Natural Spring, about 40 cents a bottle. This is the cheap stuff. Here is something called Isbre, which bills itself as “the world’s best drinking water.”

This is where the confusion gets deeper. I always thought the world’s best drinking water came out of my faucet, where it is cold, it is clean and quenches my thirst better than any liquid, and I pay the merest fractions of a cent and drink the stuff to my heart’s (and my wallet’s) content.

But here’s the really confusing part: We are fighting our way through a dreary economic time, which many economists are calling a recession and many families are calling a calamity — and yet, there they go, another bunch of bottled-water 12-packs flying off the shelves, while kitchen faucets sit there bursting with the same undeniably quenching stuff: two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, just like it says in all the chemistry books.

But here we were the other day, talking to Edith Reed, who manages the Giant at The Rotunda and, until recently, managed the Giant at White Marsh.

“As far as I can see,” she said, “people are buying more bottled water than ever.”

“But why?”

“Maybe it’s because people are staying home more. They’re not going to restaurants as much because they can’t afford it in this economy.”

A customer service manager nods her head. “We go through a ton of it,” she says. “I don’t think the economy has affected it at all.”

And yet, according to the Food Marketing Institute in Washington, D.C., consumers’ food- and beverage-buying habits have shifted considerably, as the country’s economic troubles have deepened.

“They’re buying fewer luxury items,” spokeswoman Kathleen Thomas said Tuesday. “They’re buying store labels instead of national labels, they’re using more coupons, and they’re making lists before they get to the store and sticking to the lists. It’s all part of the same trend. People are definitely taking steps to cut costs.”

And yet, we’re buying bottled drinking water by the billions of gallons and the billions of dollars.

A new book by Elizabeth Royte explains some of it. It’s called “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It.”

It’s about the modern flood of bottled water, but it’s also about marketing techniques, corporate muscle, religious questions (the morality of the “privatization” of water) and environmental questions (the millions of barrels of oil it takes to make water bottles for the U.S. market).

And it’s also about the implied social status, particularly for those who fancy the high-end stuff that can go for as much as $40 a bottle.

Are we buying it because we’re worried abut our tap water? Royte says most of us shouldn’t. About 90 percent of tap water, she writes, “meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations, regularly wins in blind taste tests against name-brand waters, and costs 240 to 10,000 times less than bottled water.”

Also, Royte points out, university studies have shown plenty of bottled water with higher bacterial levels than tap water.

If all this doesn’t make bottled water a luxury in a tough time, then what does?

We complain about this harsh economy, but sometimes we don’t help ourselves. Buying bottled water makes as much financial sense as going to one of those gas stations where they charge you for the air you put in your tires.