Are you trolling or are you really this ignorant?
You have to pay the people who run the bottling plant. You have to build the plant. You have to have insurance on the plant. You have to pay massive liability premiums, in case some rat shits in a bottle and your Quality Control Dept doesn't catch it. You have to pay to have the bottles shipped to the stores. You have to pay to advertise. Etc, etc, etc. You keep bitching about markups.......... tell me what the industry standard is, in terms of how much it costs to produce one bottle of water? Because I did google it, as I mentioned before, and the outrageous markups that you keep citing are the cost of a unit of bottled water, compared to the cost of the same unit of tap water. It's not the markup on the produced bottle of water!
Companies that bottle water -- particularly spring water -- have notoriously low overhead costs. This is true because the resource that they are selling is
free. Yes, there are costs of employees (low wage jobs), water testing (natural water sources don't require nearly the scrutiny/testing of public water systems), shipping, equipment and warehousing, but consider that even a small operation can bottle something like 250 bottles a minute sell it for, let's say, 10 cents a bottle -- that's $36K a day for a 24 hour operation.
These plants are usually pretty well automated -- meaning that all of the drawing the water from the spring, making the plastic bottles, filling them, labeling them, caping them require minimal human interaction. Interesting note: it takes the equivalent of three bottles of water to make the bottle that holds a "bottle of" water, which of course is inconsequential to our costs because the water is
free.
A small operation might have a single lab technician on staff to run water quality tests. A handful of employees can keep a facility going, and again, these are not 6-figure jobs we're talking about. Let's be generous and pay each of 10 employees on three shifts $20 an hour -- $4800 a day for the whole company -- which comes out of the $36,000 of revenue we generate each day selling this unlimited,
free resource. Oh no, now we only have made only $31K a day! How will we survive?
We've got bills to pay. Let's set aside cash for our expenses (equipment, buildings, trucks, utilities, etc.) in the amount of $5000 a day ($1.825 millions year) to pay the bills -- a ridiculously high number, I know, lest someone think I'm
ignorant for estimating too low. We are now down to a paltry $26K a day for selling a resource that is
free, and we are accounting for 30 full-time employees, shipping, storage, office space, equipment and consumables. How much do you suppose insurance and advertising will cost us? Lets again go crazy and say these will cost us $2000 a day each. We are now making a measly $21K a day. Do you think the roughly $8 million a year our company will make before taxes is worth our time?
