That's not it. People don't drink tap water because they don't believe it's safe.
People who don't drink tap water usually have no trouble drinking it after it's boiled.
And non carbonated bottled water tastes just like tap water and you couldn't tell the two apart if there were from taps and brands you are not familiar with.
I think there are even pretty big differences, say, between the tap water in Santa Clara and the tap water in Milpitas, for example.
I mean, If your argument is that bottled water is wasteful, I'm not disagreeing, but I am saying that if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste.
absolutely. in the european cities where i lived, you could sometimes tell to which aquifer a household is connected. Depending on the neighborhood some need to clean their bathroom appliances from chalk twice as often.
That isn't to say that there's no taste difference, but that preferring a specific brand of bottled water is likely to be much more about the subconscious effect of marketing than something a priori more enjoyable about the mineral content of a specific brand.
But tastes vary so much that you couldn't tell random tap from random bottled.