Best Buy Bottled Water
A case of bottled water priced at nearly $43 at a Best Buy store outside storm-ravaged Houston was a "big mistake,'' according to the retailer, with the incident sparking a social media backlash and shining a spotlight on price gouging in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.
best buy bottled water
A photo of two cases of bottled water, one selling for $42.96 and the other for $29.98, at a Best Buy in the Houston suburb of Cypress Texas, was posted on Twitter Tuesday by a journalist, unleashing a series of angry Twitter responses.
Best Buy spokesman Jeffrey Shelman apologized in a statement for what he said was an error made by a local employee who added up the cost of each individual bottle of water to come up with the price for the entire case.
He added "not as an excuse but as an explanation,'' that the big box electronics seller doesn't usually sell packages of bottled water. By contrast, Walmart, on its website, lists 24 packs of Poland Spring bottled water for $20.63.
Even if it was done in error, Best Buy's exorbitantly priced bottled water was, at least for a few hours, touted as one of the more glaring examples of the price gouging in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, which has displaced thousands of Texans and left many in search of shelter, dry clothing, and fuel.
Best Buy (BBY) is apologizing following accusations of price-gouging after a photo posted online showed cases of water for sale at one of the electronic retailer's Houston-area stores for more than $42.
Best Buy says the pricing was "clearly a mistake on the part of a few employees at a single store." The company explained in a statement that it doesn't have pricing for cases of water in its system, and employees priced the water "by multiplying the cost of one bottle by the number of bottles in a case."
"This was a big mistake on the part of a few employees at one store on Friday," a company spokesman told CNBC via email. "As a company we are focused on helping, not hurting affected people. We're sorry and it won't happen again. Not as an excuse but as an explanation, we don't typically sell cases of water. The mistake was made when employees priced a case of water using the single-bottle price for each bottle in the case."
For shoppers, bottled water is also a thousand times more expensive than tap water. Add in the fact that in 2014 nearly 64% of all bottled water sold in the US was nothing more than pricey, prepackaged tap water (PDF), and it becomes difficult to deny the value of a well-made reusable water bottle.
The Purifyou is made of borosilicate glass, and that makes it special. Borosilicate glass resists thermal shock. This means if you take the bottle out of a hot dishwasher and fill it with cold or room-temperature water, it will resist shattering better than bottles made of common soda-lime glass.
Our 2017 travel pick, the Platypus Meta, tends to develop a small hole in its bottom, which renders it useless for carrying water. Our 2016 pick, the Platypus SoftBottle, is watertight but floppy, as all collapsible bag-bottles are.
The Pogo plastic water bottle is basic and functional. We like the lid (again, just as with the Takeya) and the flip top that closes over the spout. We encountered no leaks, but at the time we tested this bottle, it had a bad Fakespot rating (a D). As of March 2023, the rating is a B, so we plan to look at it again.
Residents had sent around 500 claims of price-gouging(Opens in a new tab) to Paxton's office as of Monday, including reports of water cases sold for nearly $100, gas going for $10 a gallon, and hotel room prices three-four times their regular cost.
Someone from dispatch team called me and said we are able to schedule an appointment on Aug 17th and I understand it very far away but if you have your technician come in and rectify the problem and also if the bill is under $300 you can go ahead with repairs but anything over $300 needs to be approved. I scheduled a tech to come to check our fridge and the estimate was over $300 so sent the invoice to removed per forum guidelines on 30th July since I have not heard and we are buying bottled water called geek squad today to check the status of invoice and how soon it can be approved.
I got JOE(in CAPS because he was so tough to talk) on phone and he said it is not a big repair why dont you drink water out of faucet and whenever the invoice team processes your bill you can get it done. How insenstive can Joe be I wonder, when asked him to give it your supervisor he said he cannot transfer or give an employee number to escalate.
I am very disappointed with Best Buy and I don't think I would advice anyone to apply extended warranty via AIG because there are delays in scheduling appointments/delays in processing INVOICE approvals and top of it we have JOE's who talk drink water out of your faucet who dont even know if the customer is having Medicial Conditions
The photo, which was posted to Twitter Tuesday, showed 24-packs of bottled water selling for $42.96 and led to accusations the store was price gouging in the wake of extensive flooding and destruction wrought by the storm, CNBC reports.
Drinking water and staying hydrated is an essential part of being healthy, but picking up any brand of bottled water to reach your suggested daily intake might not be the smartest move. Many bottled water brands have acidic pH levels and added fluoride, which can be damaging to your teeth.
While some water filters are designed to screen out potentially deadly lead, many filters and bottled water with added minerals simply improve the taste of water. PhotoAlto/Antoine Arraou/Getty Images hide caption
You can buy water with electrolytes, minerals or completely "purified." You can buy it with the pH changed to make it alkaline. You can purify your own tap water or even add nutrients back into it. But after seeing a video of a pricey, high-tech filter (about $400 U.S. on sale) that you can monitor with your phone, we wondered, how much of our water filtration fixation is healthy, and how much of it is hype?
"Assuming that the [tap] water satisfies all health and safety codes for the community, yeah, it's perfectly fine," says Dan Heil, a professor of health and human performance at Montana State University.
U.S. tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, which sets safety thresholds for the amount of microorganisms, chemicals and other contaminants in the water. "In general, the drinking water quality in the U.S. is very good," says Stuart Batterman, a professor of environmental health sciences at University of Michigan.
Of course, there are exceptions, the most glaring being the lead pollution of Flint, Michigan's water brought on by crumbling infrastructure and government mismanagement. The toxic effects of lead can be especially troublesome in children, and even low levels of lead exposure have been linked to nervous system damage, learning disabilities, short stature and impaired hearing.
In a situation like that, there are quite a few filters that can remove lead from the water, according to the Environmental Working Group. Back in 2016, NPR created a test you can use to check if you have lead pipes in your home. If you want to investigate the safety of your water further, this tool can show you if your water is in compliance with federal drinking water standards.
But say you live somewhere with safe water and want to run your tap water through a filter before drinking it. All that's really doing, Heil says, is making it more palatable by changing the odor or the taste. There's nothing really wrong with that, he says. If liking the taste of your water makes you drink more, then go for it.
When it comes to health, Tanis Fenton, a registered dietitian and epidemiologist at Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, says the typical water filter sitting in your fridge won't really do anything. It probably won't even do that much for safety, since she says microbiological decontamination generally requires a sterilization step using UV light or sterilization chemicals.
There actually might even be a bit of a risk if people over-purify their water, says Neil Ward, an analytical chemistry professor at the University of Surrey in the U.K. If you constantly drink sterilized water, your gut flora could become used to that. And then in the off chance you drink water that isn't sterilized, he says your gut could react even more dramatically (and unpleasantly) to microbes or nitrates in the water.
But what about adding minerals like calcium, potassium and magnesium to the water, like the filter from the video? If you're trying to replace all of the minerals from a healthy diet with mineralized water, Heil says it's probably just not going to happen. He says you'd have to drink gallons upon gallons of mineralized water before any health benefits are realized.
"Rather than relying first on some fancy, expensive water, the first thing would be to modify your diet so that you are getting in all of the essential minerals and nutrients that your diet should be able to provide on it's own," he says.
Another confusing water option lining the shelves of grocery stores is alkaline water. Alkaline is a fancy way of saying "basic," and this water's pH is a bit higher than standard tap water. Some proponents say this water can neutralize acid in your bloodstream or help prevent cancer and heart disease, but there's not a lot of research to back that up.
Fenton says there are no health benefits to alkaline water, but there have been instances of side effects, like reduced gallbladder emptying and toxic reactions. Baby rats given alkaline water even showed low body weight and cardiac problems.
Water, just like cars, cell phones and shoes, is a part of the commercial market, says Ward. Purifying or adding minerals to water are ways to convince customers that one product is better than its competitors, even if in reality the only thing that changes about the water is the taste.
People also tend to like the idea of a quick and easy way to take the "healthy" route, says Heil, and buying a bottle of water with minerals in it is easier than uprooting a diet to make it more nutritious. 041b061a72
