Bottled NYC tap water not at all a gimmick, all about local and green and stuff

Posted by Jerry on Sep. 29, 2008

$Tap\'dNY Bottled Tap Water$ Entrepreneur Craig Zucker is bottling and selling NYC tap water. Now that’s some chutzpah.

On the one hand, the fact is tap water is generally safe and delicious. I don’t understand buying the stuff except when you’re out and about and what you’re really buying is the convenience. On the other hand, I’m not crazy about Zucker’s enviro-nationalist-adbusterese “manifesto” on the Tap’dNY site. In part it reads:

Year after year, bottled water companies have told us that their water was somehow healthier or better for us than our own water. They spent billions of dollars on marketing to make us believe that we needed exotic water, in sleek packaging, from far away Arctic glaciers, tropical islands, and European volcanoes.

We fell for the fancy marketing gimmicks, too, and the brands we drank started to become status symbols.

Totally, because bottling tap water is not a gimmick, and there’s no way people would ever take politically correct water and use it as a status symbol.

Other copy on the site talks about the “miles saved” by not having to ship in the water from abroad, and that the local water requires “little energy to produce.” The site’s ordering page explains, “We do not deliver to Fiji or France—they can keep their water and we’ll keep ours.”

It’s curious that although the water is all local, it costs at least as much as the French variety. A 20 oz bottle of Tap’dNY costs $1.50, or 7.5¢ an ounce. Looking at Peapod, Evian is going for as little as .047¢ an ounce when you buy the liter bottle. I’m all for local—even if it’s more expensive—when it’s about quality and taste. But if it’s not about taste or quality (and certainly not about falling for marketing gimmicks), then Tap’dNY water makes as much sense as paying twice as much for an iPod because it was assembled in the Bronx.

Update: Caleb Brown points out an upside to bottled NYC tap water: we can figure out once and for all whether it’s the water that makes New York bagels good and, if so, end that city’s monopoly on deliciousness. True, but with the caveat that, according to its site, Tap’dNY purifies its water before bottling. As we all know, tastiness is in the impurities.

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