The logic is simple. If “pwede na yan” weren’t the norm in infrastructure, there are a number of implications:

[1] You’d be drinking doubt-free clean water off the tap;

[2] Which means you won’t even be drawn to retail-bought bottled water because you could drink it from home or pack it with you with your own jug;

[3] Which means unless you choose flavored drinks when you eat out, it won’t cost you anything to choose water as beverage;

[4] Which gives you more savings – perhaps more disposable income becomes available for you – so you get to spend a little more on other things important to you; so

[5] If the bottled water industry weren’t so big, then we’d have that much carbon footprint removed from our day-to-day impact on the environment as a national collective.

If you can’t imagine how skillful marketing comes into play, you only need to see the range of varying prices different brands of bottled water have. Seeing how Evian and Perrier peg their prices, have you ever asked yourself whether those who drink them are better off than those who pick cheaper brands? Don’t you wonder, despite the presence of so many brands in the market with rather similar prices (you can graph them in clusters), why more and more manufacturers are drawn to introducing more brands in the market without offering anything different (in terms of perceptible product quality or attribute)? The bottomline is, these manufacturers capitalize on existing questionable tap water safety and at the same time match your demographic and market segmentation with the highest possible pricing they could implement without you balking (yes, that’s the very principle of pricing: determining the greatest possible amount you’d be willing to part with in a single transaction). This has less to do with production cost and everything to do with profit.

So the rant is valid, and you can’t oversimplify the problem to merely include the environmental impact of business operations. The money you spend on bottled water might mean little to you, but to lots of less privileged Filipinos the cost of safe drinking water has to compete with what little money they have for food, shelter, medicine.

Hey tap in Cebu is really clean. I heard from a retail insider that bottled water doesn’t sell as much there than it does in Manila (per inhabitant, not absolute sales volume).