ETHOS WATER - Oh Come Now

I just ran into a bottle of Ethos Water. It is a bottled water company owned by Starbucks. Apparantly for every bottle you buy, five cents will go to a fund to raise ten million dollars over the next six years to provide clean water to the world's masses.

Ok now. I know this sounds like a great humanitarian gesture, but really think about it. One small bottle of this water costs anywhere from $1.50 to $2. I bet Starbucks produces each bottle for maybe ten or twenty cents. So out of the profit they can only give five cents? Sound a bit cheap to me.

Now, let's think just a bit deeper. We seem to be on this bottled water craze. Now that the media is having a field day about the medicines being found in tap water, I'm sure it will send the ignorant masses in droves to buy more, super expensive bottled water.

Let's put this "contamination" problem into perspective. We're talking parts per BILLION and TRILLION. I heard that to get a full dose of one of the medications, you would have to drink the equivalent of 120 Olympic sized swimming pools. In other words, for all practical purposes there is no contamination. The U.S. has some of the safest drinking water on the planet.

So back to Ethos Water. If someone really cared so deeply about the thirsty multitudes, instead of buying this stuff, drink tap water. Then, put the money you would have spent each day on a couple of bottles of Ethos into an account. When it grows to $50, or $100, or you pick the amount, send a check to one of the organizations who actually do go out and build water systems in third world countries.

If everyone who is buying Ethos Water were to do that, the ten million dollars would probably be raised in a year. Now that is truly helping the thirsty.