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Comment by adwhit | Hacker News Reader

I think it's also important to understand that most of these companies are advertising companies first and foremost. Their business models revolve around the creation of demand for things that no rational society would want.

Why would anyone buy bottled water when it comes practically free from the tap? Why would anyone buy bread that has had all the tasty goodness removed ('white bread')? Why would anyone buy branded toothpaste when the chemically-identical supermarket version is half the price? Why would anyone want roasted grain coated in sugar as the first thing you eat each day? Would anyone buy sugary water (a.k.a. pop) if they knew just how bad sugar is for them? Why would anyone want hydrogenated vegetable oil instead of butter?

Unilever can go hang.

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> Why would anyone buy bottled water

Some reasons: immediacy, taste, convenience, quality, lack of price sensitivity.

> Why would anyone buy [prepackaged white bread]

Texture, goes stale slower than fresh baked bread, sizing, taste, convenience.

> Why would anyone buy [brand toothpaste vs store-brand toothpaste]

Taste, familiarity, trust.

A colleague of mine purchases 12x 500ML bottles of Evian a week. That will be over 600 bottles of water in 2018, not including the bottled water he drinks at home.

Sure, bottled water tastes a little better than tap water, but I can’t help but cringe at the thought of 600 plastic bottles going into landfill. I avoid bottled water as much as possible, however when required I admit I do purchase 6 packs of 2L bottles for long road trips.

> Sure, bottled water tastes a little better than tap water

I guess it depends on where you live, but this is definitely not the case for me. And I live in a 111 year old building.

Old lead pipes apparently do make water taste sweeter...

I did this when I was in Thailand and thought it was completely insane and wasteful. It's shocking people do this because they don't like the taste of their tap water. Just purify it if you hate it that much? Also, the taste of any water pretty much disappears once you get used to it, so the thought of someone hating tap water is just absurd.

People do buy these things, so clearly there must be reasons for doing so. Point is, are they good reasons? And are they real reasons, or have they been put there by some big (and yes, evil) corporation?

The BBC did a wonderfully subversive 3-part documentary a few years ago called "The foods that make billions", which investigates in some depth the way people's tastes have been shaped to accept anything the food industry comes up with (no matter how disgusting in concept). Well worth tracking down on YouTube or whatever (particularly the episode about yoghurt, which I found grimly hilarious).

>> Why would anyone buy [brand toothpaste vs store-brand toothpaste]

> Taste, familiarity, trust.

That's the idea; familiarity and trust can be manufactured through advertising. You can become familiar with a brand name just by being exposed to it, and trust is harder but advertisers have it down to a science in some important ways.

There is more to trust than advertising. You also must produce a consistent product.

* Why would anyone want roasted grain coated in sugar as the first thing you eat each day?*

IKR? The tub of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey is right there! And you don't have to pour the milk!

>Why would anyone buy bottled water when it comes practically free from the tap?

A question I often ask myself because the tap water in my house is literally the stuff they put in the bottles (mountain spring fresh etc). And yet the entire family drinks bottled water hauled at great carbon footprint via Costco, probably bottled in California which is 1200 miles away.

My best answer is that if I were to lay down the law and mandate everyone turn on the tap to get their water[1], I'd be viewed as the cook tinfoil hat Dad everyone hates.

How the water-industrial-complex arranged for that to be the state of play is a very intriguing question I think.

[1]Sometimes people prefer bottled water to tap only because they store the bottles in the fridge. Cold water to some people tastes better, but if you ran a blind test where you took their tap water, put it in bottles and chilled them, they can't tell the difference. This does not explain things in my house however because the bottles are kept at room temp.

> I'd be viewed as the cook tinfoil hat Dad everyone hates.

Maybe it's just a matter of rebranding yourself as the nature-loving, environmentally-conscious Dad who wants to keep the world plastic-free for your children :-)

> Why would anyone buy bottled water when it comes practically free from the tap?

You're in a place where tap water is not safe to drink and don't have a way to boil it. You live in a place where tap water is safe to drink, but tastes of sulfur. You're traveling and will want water in the next N hours. ...

It does not sound like you are answering in good faith. A more considerate — and basically obvious — interpretation of "when [water] comes free from the tap" is that the writer meant potable water.

Sure, there are many regions where potable water is difficult to attain, and there _are_ reasons to bottle water, but your contributions are disingenuously oblique.

I'm not even taking about places where potable water is not available. In North of Iceland you drink, eat, and bathe in sulfur favoured water. It's perfectly fine. But it's great to buy a bottled one from time to time.

How many people in the US live somewhere the tap water is unsafe. How many people on the US drink tap water. That second circle is much larger. So why do people drink bottled water?

> Why would anyone buy branded toothpaste when the chemically-identical supermarket version is half the price?

Doesn't really matter, they are both manufactured and sold by the same company, at the same facility. The difference is just to provide the illusion of choice (and the price difference is usually much smaller, just enough to trigger a response in a certain common kind of consumer.)

Some of the products do have reasons for existing, the brand versions might not be superior.

Bottled water: Because you don't always have a tap on hand and you don't always bring a water bottle from home. Some regions doesn't have water that can be consumed directly from the tap for sanitary reasons.

Hydrogenated vegetable oil: Because of lactose intolerance, and because liquid vegetable oil wouldn't be useful in the situation.

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