Thirst is an interesting dilemma. When our throats dry our minds seem to parch in step and our decision making skills diminish to the dribble of a leaky faucet.

CocaCola corp has long capitalized on this inversion of sensibility of humans by selling sweetened brine to satiate our mouths and much like the contradicting warmth of alcohol for the frost bitten, our drinking habits are killing us in more ways than one.

In 1994 PepsiCo launched Aquafina. By 1999 CocaCola had responded with Dasani and water soon had it’s own isle in grocery stores. Recent global valuations showed it as a $60 Billion dollar market, with Americans, whom have access to some of the cleanest and most reliable and regulated water on the planet, disappointingly drinking almost 9 billion gallons of that market every year.

Many consumers appear to have grown over time to embrace the consumable, in accordance with their addiction to their corn-chips and chicken-nuggets, and with prices ever creeping skyward, the addiction is becoming every obvious.

We know that water is the key to life, but exemplifying the consumer’s disregard for logic is the seemingly irrational elasticity of water’s price.

After considereing the most expensive water available on the US West coast, desalinized, we’re skeptical that it’s consumer desire to live that is driving the market. Desalinized water’s cost per acre foot, the amount of water it takes to cover one acre in one foot of water or roughly 326,000 gallons, is often estimated at $3000, or approximately 600% what normal municipalities pay for surface or ground water. Using this extravagant rate, we did the complex division to find our per gallon cost of the most expensive water we could find. Turns out it is $0.009 per gallon or $0.000857 (eight and a half hundredths of a cent)/ 12oz bottle of water. Compare this to the $1.25 bottle of municipal sourced water for sale in quick-stop refrigerators. It is more than 1,450% the cost of clean regulated purified water.

We conclude consumers of bottled water are either brain-dead or indiscriminately wealthy… or both.