User:Campaigner8/Consumer Culture

Richard Wilk has written an article about bottled water and the consumerist basis it has in society. The base point of this article is to point out how water is free and it is abundant, but over time it has become a point of marketing. The debate has always existed if there is a real difference in taste between bottled water and tap water. When it comes down to it, during many blind tastes, people can not even tell which was tap and which was bottled, and more often than not tap water won for better taste. Water has always been regarded as this pure substance and has connections in many religions. Throughout history, it has been shown that control over water is equivalent to control over untamed nature, and this has been shown in movies as well. To build on this idea, Wilk points out how having bottled water enforces the idea of this control over nature and the need that humans have for water. To further enforce this idea of natural and pure water, a 1999 report by the National Resources Defense Council found that many water companies use words like “pure” and “pristine” to aid in marketing. Wilk explains that it is more than just the marketing of it being pure, but that people want bottled water because they know the source. Public water comes from an anonymous source and Wilk concludes that the home is an extension of ourselves, so why would we want to bring an unknown specimen into our home. This is where the bottled water preference comes in, according to Wilk, because people can trace it back to where it came from. In addition to this idea, many brands and companies have started marketing water towards specific needs like special water for women, for kids, for athletes, and so on. This increases competition between brands and takes away from customers being able to choose what water they really want. This is due to the larger companies being able to make more connections and pay the expensive fee to be sold on the shelves. Wilk concludes that since it is hard to trust either, it comes down to which is distrusted least.