Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [16]
Coke and Pepsi have other advantages over regional or imported spring or mineral water. Since they already have supply deals with large retail chains, it’s a simple matter to push their water into those stores, and into their branded vending machines in schools, stadiums, office buildings, and other public places. One exception is in New York City, where Pepsi has the contract for the Department of Environmental Protection’s headquarters, in Queens. When the company began stocking its vending machines with Aquafina, DEP ordered the product out of the building. “We drink our own water here!” the agency scolded the company. Now the machines sell sodas, and sports and fruit drinks, and employees sip bits of Esopus Creek, one of the city’s water sources in the Catskill Mountains, from water fountains bolted to the wall.
As if reaching out to retail customers weren’t enough, Nestlé in 2002 produced a CD-ROM training manual called “Pour on the Tips,” aimed at waiters. Converting just twenty guests per shift from tap water to bottled, said the CD, would bring in an extra hundred bucks, or more, a month. Waiters were taught to repeatedly fill fancy goblets nearly to the top with fancy water (in addition to Perrier, Nestlé also imports San Pellegrino, Contrex, and Acqua Panna), and to identify the table’s “lead buyer.” Then, to shame him or her. As waiter-turned-restaurant-consultant Bob Brown told the Wall Street Journal, “I say ‘Would you like to have a couple more bottles chilled down?’ Most of the time they say yes. It feeds their ego.”
On the Waiter’s Revenge Internet message board, a server who goes by the name Dollfinn wrote, “I get great pleasure out of making each of those ladies who are trying to impress their friends . . . repeat the word ‘tap’ back to me.” Restaurants were advised to serve brands their customers wouldn’t know from the supermarket shelves, the better to jack up their retail price. Bottled water has the highest markup of any item on a menu; or in a gas station mini-mart, for that matter. According to Andre van der Valk, who owns a Shell station in Los Angeles, “You tend to make at least fifty to sixty percent on a bottle of water. [It’s] more profitable than gasoline.” According to restaurant consultant Clark Wolf, the restaurant industry takes in between $200 million and $350 million from bottled water each year.
The outrageous success of bottled water, in a country where more than 89 percent of tap water 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, is an unparalleled social phenomenon, one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But why did the marketing work? At least part of the answer, I’m beginning to understand, is that bottled water plays into our ever-growing laziness and impatience.
Americans eat and drink more on the run than ever before. The author Michael Pollan reports that one in three American children eat fast food every single day, and 19 percent of American meals and snacks are eaten in the car. Bottled water fills a perceived need for convenience (convenience without the calories of soda, that is): hydration on the go, with bottles that fit in the palm of the hand, in a briefcase or purse.
According to research conducted by the Container Recycling Institute (CRI), between 1960 and 1970 the average person bought 200 to 250 packaged drinks each year—mostly soda and beer—and many of those were in refillable bottles. When I was growing up, my family drank only from the faucet and from family-size containers. We quenched our thirst, when out and about, with water from public fountains. Either that, or we waited till we got where we were going. On picnics, we might have a big plastic jug of lemonade, homemade. Sure, the