What is more boring than a normal bottle of water? Nothing.
Well, this is what I thought too. Until the day I discovered that there is a very exciting story behind each bottle of water.I woke up this morning as usual at 7:20 , to head up to work, In my way I stopped at the grocery for snacks and a bottle of water. I met boring people, I smiled to cats in the road... All the boring usual.
This water is from a very well know trademark who was known since 1933 in Morocco. The French colonization exploited natural water sources to make this commodity available for the public. Then in my head, that boring Teacher of microeconomics starts talking : We assume that a factory of bottled water is running with zero fixed cost to simplify the equations.
The bottled water industry is one of the silliest human inventions especially with the existence of running water in cities and people at the countryside who do not consume this commodity. So what is the secret of the very lucrative business? What do I buy in bottled water?
1-I buy a plastic recipient: yeah! and you can imagine all the number of chemical reactions involved in building plastic compounds from Petroleum. Yes! that petroleum that is the accumulation of millions of years of very slow chemical réactions on the organic matter of some creatures that lived on Earth eras ago. That petroleum, we have no idea what kind of agreements , political conflicts, what kind of wars were fought in order to split ownership of the ressources, what people worked to extract it from Earth, what ships sailed the large oceans to bring it to manufacturing....and at the end: who is the fat guy in the shiny suit who will put in his bank account the engrossed profit.
The plastic bottle has a weird mechanism: The amazing bottle cap, yeah ! you heard me. In the past, it was trivial that most bottles and recipients were capped by some kind of a cork which was expensive as it was generally made from the cork tree. The plastic bottle cap is less expensive, and it has a screw-like mechanism to ensure that nothing goes out. I am not that smart to come up with such a brilliant idea, I really thank the guy who invented it.
2-I buy water: molecules of the Dioxyde of Hydrogen , the secret of life, "El agua Del la vida", the thing that is 66% of my body weight. (If I get mummified, my mummy will be waiting less than 18 Kilos) Can you believe how crazy it is? Some researchers proved recently the water molecules are even older than the solar system. Which means that most of the particles I drink, that are part of me, that exist on Earth ,were formed before the formation of our dear Solar System. Some of these particles in this bottle of water are more than 4.5 billion years old!
3- I buy some other minerals, like calcium , sodium ...(These are Alkali Métals) which are necessary for that my biological system keeps running smoothly.
A bottle of Water my dear friend, is not a simple commodity, it is the result of a process that started more than 4.5 billions years ago. That very process involves millions of creatures (Plants, animals especially humans, physical and chemical reactions, market variables, competitions, games of decision, Politics...)
Hell , I can write a book of more than 300 pages talking about all the variables that led me this morning to decide to acquire that bottle of water with that price. But a long book is going to be boring! I prefer not!
0 commentaires