Water at the tap or a jug?
By: Jon Bispala 09/01/2011
I went to the grocery store and bought something I had never bought before, a 2.5 gallon container of “purified water.”
Some in our family prefer bottled water to Minneapolis water, but not I. Well, I wanted to see how and if this new jug really works and to calculate the difference in price between the bottled kind and the same stuff in the large jug. You’d think it would be cheaper. You know, a “quantity discount.”
The 2.5 gal. jug cost me $2.87; whereas, a carton of 24 half liter bottles was about $5, not on sale that day. Converting all those quantities down to ounces according to the numbers provided on the packages, I concluded that the water in the jug cost me just under a penny ($0.009) per ounce. The price for the 24 pack of bottles amounted to just over a penny ($0.012) per ounce, not much different.
Besides that, I could hardly get the water out of the jug very neatly! I tugged and tugged on that ornery spigot, fearing all the water might suddenly run into the refrigerator and onto the floor. I had even called the store, and the customer service person was nice enough to actually go over to the beverage isle and take a look at how to get water out of the jug. He came back to the telephone and informed me, “Just pull out on the plug-like spigot. The spigot looks like it’s spring loaded and will return to a closed position when you let go.” That really was the right advice even though I could see no metal spring to in translucent plastic spigot. I guess it turned out to be a plastic spring, which I feared would just break if I pulled out too hard! Of course, I thanked him for taking the trouble and informing me.
After all that work, I felt I deserved to take a drink from this water jug. But let me tell you, I really didn’t like it! The water didn’t have any taste to it. As purified water, that’s all it was. It didn’t seem to have any of those minerals leached from the soil and streams of our wonderful Minnesota.
Jon Bispala,
Webber-Camden