Posted on 02/15/2006 1:49:53 PM PST by neverdem
IN 1977 the American public saw its first television commercial for bottled water. Orson Welles crooned about a place in the south of France where "there is a spring, and its name is Perrier," and the response was feverish. American sales of Perrier went up more than 3,000 percent from 1976 to 1979.
"I remember thousands of us running in Perrier T-shirts in the 1979 marathon," said Johanna Raymond, a New Yorker. "Perrier was the coolest thing then. It was more than water."
Since Perrier's introduction, the American market for bottled water has grown from almost nothing into the world's largest. The Beverage Marketing Corporation, the industry's main research group, says that Americans spent more than $9 billion on bottled water in 2004 (the latest year for which complete figures are available) and that the product's rate of growth was almost 10 percent a year for the previous 10 years, something almost unheard of in food marketing. "There appears to be no limit," said Gary Hemphill, an analyst with the beverage marketing group, "to how thirsty Americans are."
Nor to the ways the bottlers sell water. The forests of France and the hills of Maine quickly evolved into Icelandic glaciers and Pacific aquifers, and for the 40 percent of bottled waters that are made from municipal tap water, bottlers tout arcane methods of distillation and filtration and add minerals to get a better, more "watery" taste. Now, the selling point is often not the water, but what's in it: the flavorings, the vitamins, the stimulants and other "enhancements" that are supposed to be an improvement on simple H2O.
From those first irresistible green bottles of Perrier, Americans have been positively cultish about water. "I could not get through the day without Poland Spring," said Mark Swigart, a pharmaceutical sales representative...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The autobiography of Ted The Swimmer Kennedy
I know how he feels, I couldn't make it through the day without good ol' Texas Brazos Brown.
"Naive" spelled backwards...
I wish I would have thought of bottling water. Just another thing on that list.
Great episode.
But P&T addressed cities with adequate water supplies.
Having lived in Mexico and a certain Greek island, I can tell you that there is no substitute for bottled water.
At home, I use reverse osmosis and there's not mistaking the difference.
At work, you can smell the tap water. How's that for a compound that's supposed to be odorless?
That is, we triple filter the drinking water at work.
May you have eternal damnation. I spent twenty minutes looking for that word in the article.
Ok.....now I get it..... I need to buy a clue....damn!!!!....I'm just getting old.
I swear Deer Park had the first bottled water commercial...."Deer Park, that's good water!".....no?
Only if they first remove the deer.
Same here. It's equivalent to getting Aquafina from the tap. My main complaint is that the ice cubes get really sharp edges.
It certainly was. It was, and still is, a fizzy ripoff.
On the serious side, I drink a lot of Big K Lemon Lime Sparkling Water. It's canned for/by Kroger, and I get it at Fry's Market for $4 per TWO twelve packs.
I wish I would have thought of bottling water. Just another thing on that list.
Velcro, paper towels, post-its....
If it's American, drink up. I'd never drink, let alone buy, that overpriced French pisswater. And the same goes for that cheese-eating frog urine Evian as well.
I drink the original bottled water...beer.
believe it or not, in the mid 80's, I thought of Tae Kwon Do done to music as a form of aerobics...only I couldn't stand disco, so I never did anything with it...I could have made millions.
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