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How Wal-Mart Makes An Instant 65,724% Profit Selling... California Water
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Wal-Mart is facing questions tonight after CBS13 learns the company draws its bottled water from a Sacramento water district during California’s drought.
According to its own labeling, the water in the gallon jugs appears to come from Sacramento’s water supply.
Sacramento sells water to a bottler, DS Services of America, at 99 cents for every 748 gallons—the same rate as other commercial and residential customers. That water is then bottled and sold at Walmart for 88 cents per gallon, meaning that $1 of water from Sacramento turns into $658.24 for Walmart and DS Services.
– From the CBS News in Sacramento article: Wal-Mart Bottled Water Comes From Sacramento Municipal Supply
We all know there’s a severe drought plaguing much of California. I haven’t focused on this topic much, but I did publish a very powerful post on it last fall titled: Video of the Day – Stunning Scenes from California’s Central Valley Drought. I suggest checking it out if you missed it the first time.
Now we learn of some pretty troubling news that Wal-Mart is sourcing some of its bottled water from the Sacramento water supply, despite the fact that: “Sacramento-area water districts are preparing to enforce residential water-use cuts as high as 36 percent.”
As we all know, you should never let a historic drought get in the way of corporate profit margins; and these appear to be some really nice margins. We learn from CBS News in Sacramento that:
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — Wal-Mart is facing questions tonight after CBS13 learns the company draws its bottled water from a Sacramento water district during California’s drought.
According to the label, the water comes from the Sacramento Municipal Water Supply. This comes on the heels of Starbucks opting to move sourcing and production of its Ethos bottled water from California to Pennsylvania.
While the label reads Great Value, the fine print reveals the bottled water is anything but a deal, especially for Sacramento residents.
Sacramento sells water to a bottler, DS Services of America, at 99 cents for every 748 gallons—the same rate as other commercial and residential customers. That water is then bottled and sold at Walmart for 88 cents per gallon, meaning that $1 of water from Sacramento turns into $658.24 for Walmart and DS Services.
Shouldn’t the residents of Sacramento at least share in some of the profits earned if the municipality is going to sell its precious local resources to a mega corporation?
Elmets wonders if this perfectly legal business operation will get a big thumbs-down from California consumers. This comes as Sacramento-area water districts are preparing to enforce residential water-use cuts as high as 36 percent.
“It’s certainly leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth when you can’t fill up a swimming pool, if you’re building a new home in West Sacramento; you can’t water your lawn if you’re living in this region. And to find out they’re making a huge profit off of this, it’s just not right,” Elmets said.
Meanwhile, let’s not forget…
Walmart Admits in its Annual Report that its Profits Depend Heavily on Corporate Welfare
Let’s see if the people of Sacramento have the will or ability to do anything about this.
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Ermigawd - someone's making a profit! Quick - tax and fine the shit out of them!
I'm making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... www.jobs-review.com
Listen, son, you're going to wear out a lot of kneepads if you're making $7k+ a month giving nickel blowjobs.
Kwik-E-Mart, aka Walmart, doesn't give a flying fuck about you, the club member....
Unless they can profit. Duh.
Pretty much all bottled water is nothing but filtered city tap water that is bottled and marked up 6000%
B O Y C O T T !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Something tells me Walmart may be on the chopping block S O O N....
And what is the profit margin on Zero Hedge's spam ads?
Adblock. Kills annoying ads dead.
leave it to those fucking waltons.
Bottled water is the biggest scam going, at least in countries with potable piped water.
'potable piped water'
You mean drinking your recycled human waste? Yum.
Ghostery is better. You can use both.
and miss those fetching sheinside models? in their hot and bothersome outfits? itn.
When even Mother Jones, avoids targeting Walmart to focus their attention on the big four- Coke, Pepsi, Arrowhead and Crystal Geyser, plus Starbucks, and qualifies every article that bottled water production in California is a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the 80% of water usage that agriculture consumes, perhaps there is a better way to make the "anti-profit" appeal...
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/08/bottled-water-california-...
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/04/starbucks-making-bank-cal...
And shame on whichever Tyler graduated from the Obama school of profits-to-earnings ratios. 65,724%? Perhaps FASB changed something (again), but the last time I checked, the formula for profits was rather simple: profits = revenues - expenses. Governor Moonbeam's ass doesn't come for free.
Some people probably think the name EVIAN was just a coincidence.
NAIVE most certainly describes the habitual purchasers of bottled water.
This has got to be Kreiger's dumbest article ever.
Comparing an input cost to the final retail price and calling it profit ignores quite a few things.
Exactly. We are counting pennies of resouce cost and many many pennies of distribution costs
And this being his dumbest article is saying quite a lot.
Liberty Blitzkrieg blog. Just the name gets me exci
As much a I might enjoy busting on Krieger after his dumber articles. Krieger didn't actually actually call it "profit" even if the entire article was a cheap and purely anti-profit hit piece (I guess they actually make people take econ 101 before handing out economics degrees from Duke).
The shame for the profit sin lies elsewhere.
Wal-Mart is a piker next to Nestle's
Wal-Mart pays $0.99 for 768 gallons in California.
Nestle's pays British Columbia $2.25 per 1 million litres ( about 250,000 gallons)
http://www.theprovince.com/news/Outrage+boils+over+government+plans+sell...
they are draining lake michigan.
This has always been the case with most bottled water. It comes from a municipal source.
Yep, and it even says so right there on the label...not to take anything away from the crack journalists working at CBS13 that broke this story.
All bottled water comes from a couple in Pittsburgh that fills them up in their bathtub.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqXFrs6quvE
you said 9k at another posting...street walking?
"Ermigawd - someone's making a profit! "
That's what you got out of the article?
California is (at least reported to be) in the worst drought of modern times- and they're selling bottled water domestically- across the US? Not to mention all the other companies like Nestle!
I live where water is always plentiful and pure.
Why in the world would WalMart, or any other business, extract water resources from a state that has so little- in the drought conditions?
It makes no sense.
Logistics from a WalMart perspective. Logistics is where the profit comes into perspective.
Drought is irrelevant to the logistics of their distribution system.
Logistics is everything.
Great Generals win battles, logistics wins wars. Period!
Walmart, mastered logistics.
SH
So did, apparently, Mayer Rothschild and the other wealthy banking dynasties
dupe
Because of government interference which prohibits true market rates for water. This shit was designed by lawyers, not engineers.
I guess you just read - and believe - headlines and government apparatchiks?
Read: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0320-drought-explainer-20150320-story.html
Money quote:
He explained that the state's reservoirs have only about a one-year supply of water remaining. Reservoirs provide only a portion of the water used in California and are designed to store only a few years' supply. But the online headline generated great interest. Famiglietti said it gave some the false impression that California is at risk of exhausting its water supplies.
The satellite data he cited, which measure a wide variety of water resources, show "we are way worse off this year than last year," he said. "But we're not going to run out of water in 2016," because decades worth of groundwater remain.
So, tell me, how does "decades (note the plural) worth of groundwater" equate to a shortage? Just another power/control grab by worthless statist douchebags.
"decades worth of groundwater remain."
Why not say millions of years of groundwater remain? Good ole semantics!
If your shower head is constantly able to drip water at one drop per minute for decades does that mean you can take a shower?
"decades worth of groundwater remain." does not state a rate at which that water can be pumped or flow.
"decades worth of groundwater remain." does psychologically imply that water consumption rates will increase at a .gov mandated 2-4% rate per annum for decades.
.gov apparatchiks are expert at misleading commentary first and foremost.
Anyone who uses the term apparatchik or anything else alluding to Communism is way behind the curve.
They dont consider themselves Communists--they consider themselves Technocrats.
Also, anyone who argues against scarcity can't possibly be a capitalist in the sound money camp and must be by definition an apparatchik.
If there is no such thing as scarcity then why do we need capitalism? All we need to do is distribute the .gov/WalMart mandated abundance right?
"Walmart Admits in its Annual Report that its Profits Depend Heavily on Corporate Welfare. Let’s see if the people of Sacramento have the will or ability to do anything about this."
Sacramento is one of the few cities in California that has two large rivers (Sacramento River and American River) that flow through the city year round. However, Sacramento has some of the most dracronian water restrictions in the entire state with an army of water police who hand out fines for using too much water.
The people of Sacramento won't do anything because the city is filled with compliant state workers and welfare recipients who always vote Democrat and who willingly bow down to their Democrat masters.
So everyone leaves southern california in 2035, or what?
Governer Moonbeam, BUILD THAT WALL, around California, please!
"I guess you just read - and believe - headlines and government apparatchiks?"
No- that would be why my first sentence clearly stated:
"California is (at least reported to be) in the worst drought"
Now- as to why the LA Times (that you quoted) is to be taken as a source of pure, unadulterated truth- perhaps you can enlighten me?
The truth is that no one knows how much groundwater is left- and whether it is fit for human consumption.
A wise man- or company- or government- would shut down any export of water from what is purported to be an extremely drought ridden state.
To do otherwise flies in the face of logic, reason, and sound judgment.
You expect logic, reason, and sound judgment in California?
Gov. Moonbeam is spending billions of taxpayer dollars for a train between Bakersfield and Fresno. Meanwhile the state's population has more than doubled since the last water reservoir was built, trillions of gallons of water is flushed out to the ocean for the benefit of the delta smelt, and radical environmentalists want to tear down dams like the one at Hetch Hetchy near Yosemite that supplies most of San Francisco's water supply.
I don't expect any logic, reason, and sound judgment to come out of California.
I do find it good for my sanity to point that out.
Expect more failure from gubmint in California.
And sadly, as they say- "As California Goes, So Goes the Country."
I don't see any hope for the country.
I mean- in a nation of 320 million- Hitlery, Bush, and Rand are the best candidates for the next President?
They're not CANDIDATES- they're CANDIAISIS!
This use of water is negligible. Tiny. Epsilon. It's a ridiculous concern just from that standpoint. Beyond that, does anyone think much of this water goes to waste? Humans drink it, for the most part. Well, californians, but bipedal in their great majority. Its not like they are directly watering golf courses or pouring back into the river to save a bait fish. That's about a billion times bigger demand.
I can't believe this BS article made it past the censors. But now we can peruse the comments and see what kind of intellectual riffraff posts on ZH. The horror.... the horror!
Remember this the next time someone tells you how corporations should manage municipal services, cause corporations are more "efficient". Also, the residents of CA should be hanging their governor out to dry for exempting bottlers and frackers, but let's not get in the way of "free market economics" and corporations ability to maximize resources....
Any state that elects a Boxer, Finesteen or Piglosi deserves what they get.
What? Something that appreciates in value more than Gold?
Inconceivable!
Long iocaine powder.
They just wiggle their noses and the water appears in the customers hand and the money in Walmart's account. No costs whatsoever. All profit and who needs bottled water from California anyway when we can get it from France?
But the feeling people get from the label, and the feelings they get from having something that someone else doesn't (that second), are surely worth the markup.
Because, look>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>purchases happen
Let's point at the stupid shit people buy, and then blame the dude they went all the way to find just to buy it from them.
Sing along with me: D E R P
Buy low, sell high. Make margin plus a little something for the shareholders. It's all good. Why is Sacremento selling so cheap? They should try to compete with Walmart if they want to stay in business.
What's next? $40/L iWater?
FUCK YEAH!
Well waterya know........
Look! Its just raining money!
It pays to be upstream bitchez. Vegas is booming baby! LOL at these idiots.
I love this vid when times of water shortage in cali (420) become the newest thingy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x21kClCjkW0
Financial bukkake (look it up if you dare).
it constantly amazes me that folks will buy bottled water in the USA......
It'd be even more ironic to have a picture of Sacramento residents buying Walmart water.
I'm amazed that people bitch about the the few cents it costs to have some water on the go. Its essentially free when you think about the cost of packaging it up into convienient single serve portions. Do you hear me bitching about people waiting in a 20 minute line to spend $5.00 for a cofffee?
I know right. Because no one ever thought of something like a bottle, jug, canteen, camelback, or a thermos huh?
The stupid, it burns.
I have a start-up in the works.
Selling bottled small-batch artisanal Plasma Ultra-filtrate to the California market.
I think it'll sell well.
And we complain about the cost of gasoline. Those fuckers. And during extreme drought conditions. It's all about profit until there is no more.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!!!!!!!!!
couldn't Walmart claim
customers are only paying for the plastic bottle,
(and the consequent environmental costs)
but the water is "free"
You're hired. When can you start?
there was a thread on reddit today about this same story, and one of the posters who responded on the thread was involved in the bottled water industry. He says that walmart treats and purifies the water they take from the tap and then sells.
It is not just poured into the bottles from the tap. There is a plant that treats the water first.
He also said that transportation costs are significant. He also says that the water from sacramento is sold in california. Texas water is purified and sold in texas
Was just thinking about that. If they sell it locally, it doesn't make any difference.
Good for them, then. They take water from the same source that sends you your monthly water bill. They filter and bottle it, then sell it to you for 20X what you would pay for it from your tap. Good idea. Good merchandising. The package makes it all worth the cost.
I saw this am on Bloomberg TV that Starbucks just pulled their water label out of California and are moving it to Pennsylvania. The slogan on the bottle showed the continents of the world and had a phrase of something like bringing water to the children of the world.
Smartest guys in the room.
How much tax money does California, et.al., get from the sale of the water? Would other container drinks be any different? Except that they could be brought in from another area...but that would take carbon fuel to transfer. And we know even transporting container drinks in from another area would be, according to environmentalists, ...equally evil!
California doesn't tax water, only carbonated beverages and liquor.
wal-mart=BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original...
The entire state of CA would implode if WMT would just close all locations in CA. Whining sniveling jealous patrons who couldn't live without them.
Didn't we have electicity shortages under Enron?
Oh please!!! The water Walmart sells is a "drop in the ocean" compared with some nasty wasting happening there. And yes the pun was more than intended : ))
You are correct of course, but also very obvious. Water is a life resource that is controlled the world over. It is controlled for the benefit of non individuals who drink it as "water." Many municipal entities are selling it to Corporate interests at low prices. Where do you think the major soft drink bottlers, beer botlers and anyone else that uses water in its manufacturing processes, get their water from?
The plastic bottle costs more than the water that goes in it.
People could *gasp* drink water from the tap.
Of course Naive/Evian couldn't get the astronomical price for bottled water if people just did that. Let alone Nestle which is just about the scummiest food and beverage company on the planet.
The water from my tap smells like chlorine--in laymans terms means it is contaminated with urine and feces.
If it wasn't contaminated you wouldn't smell the chlorine. The small amount of chlorine only outgasses when there are contaminants present in the water.
yeah very strong smell and 'aftertaste' of Chlorine in our water here-almost like a swimming pool-and ours comes straight from the mountains......it is VERY soft though....
Starbucks moves water sourcing to Pennsylvania??? Really?
The AP found that Pennsylvania received 398 complaints in 2013 alleging that oil or natural gas drilling polluted or otherwise affected private water wells, compared with 499 in 2012. The Pennsylvania complaints can include allegations of short-term diminished water flow, as well as pollution from stray gas or other substances. More than 100 cases of pollution were confirmed over the past five years.
Just hearing the total number of complaints shocked Heather McMicken, an eastern Pennsylvania homeowner who complained about water-well contamination that state officials eventually confirmed.
and this....
The natural gas boom gripping parts of the U.S. has a nasty byproduct: wastewater so salty, and so polluted with metals like barium and strontium, that most states require drillers to get rid of the stuff by injecting it down shafts thousands of feet deep.
Not in Pennsylvania, one of the states at the center of the gas rush.
There, the liquid that gushes from gas wells is only partially treated for substances that could be environmentally harmful, then dumped into rivers and streams from which communities get their drinking water.
In the two years since the frenzy of activity began in the vast underground rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale, Pennsylvania has been the only state allowing waterways to serve as the primary disposal place for the huge amounts of wastewater produced by a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
State regulators, initially caught flat-footed, tightened the rules this year for any new water treatment plants but allowed any existing operations to continue discharging water into rivers.
Best and most profitable part for Walmart is that they don't even have to ship it from China
Yup, they've got the illegals streaming in and chasing the dream - and the fruit, nut, and granola crowd still believing the dream turned to nightmare paying for the profits of the Kleptoligarchy.
Don't let them take too much skin when they shear you Californisheeple.
I presume you are assuming filtration, plastic bottles, cases, and distribution via trucks are free.
Also, the article implies that it is Walmart's fault for making a good deal with Sacramento, not Sacramento for selling its water at a cheap rate.
Walwart is not to blame here...it is stupid, programmed zombie sheep consumers buying less than tap water for that same price increase.
using that logic, i am not to blame if i take advantage of market conditions and go on welfare (i.e., become part of the FSA) - rather, the public is to blame for sanctioning it by paying taxes for it.
or, another favorite target here - the jews - shouldn't be blamed for being usurers. they're just making a profit on a commodity - money. and if one enters into a contract with a usurer (a bank, mortgage company, etc...) then it's their fault. so using this logic, the Rothschilds et al, the 'Squid', the MIC, are all ok by you because they're just adapting to the system around them and rightfully taking advantage of 'programmed zombie sheep consumers'.
I buy cases of bottled water with my EBT card, like all the other smart people. That makes it free.
Maybe I missed something - but are we pretending Walmart is the only retailer selling bottled water from California?
Because of all the atmospheric pollution, acid rain, etc most natural water sources have some contamination. These are filtered and then bottled and then distributed which costs money.
The fact that we have to pay to drink water (in a centrally planned economy), itself shows how screwed up the human race is.
Natural water sources always have some contamination in them because even fish shit in the water and volcanoes have always produced acid rain.
BTW, fresh water is already naturally acidic because of the 2 (+) charged hydrogen protons per molecule of water, and when it runs over granite and other metamorphic rocks it naturally releases massive CO2 into the atmosphere -- so much so that the fresh water running down just the streams in the Himalayas from the monsoon rains yearly produces 25% of the global atmospheric CO2 production of the planet. Long term carbon cycle. All natural.
I do undertand your overall sentiment but the lack of science being taught in schools makes society sitting ducks for the propaganda being spewed over the TV. That's the bigger problem right now, start there.
but, wait a minute...i thought science was bad?? - and that teaching it in schools just perpetuates the 'progressive/liberal agenda'? /sarc
$0.88/gallon might be a good deal, depending on the delivered water quality.
I run all of my drinking/cooking water through a reverse osmosis filtration system (a counter top system since I live in an apartment), and it probably costs me about $2 to $3 per gallon due to the cost of replacing filters.
(Why do I do it if it's that expensive? Doing the filtering myself is more convenient, because I don't have to lug water home from the store. Also, my water is stored in stainless steel containers, not plastic, so I don't have to worry about chemicals leaching out of the plastic into the water over time. And I know what the filtration process is, as opposed to whatever they may or may not be doing with bottled water at the store. TDS straight from my tap is typically ~27 ppm and you really don't want to drink it - some days it's so bad you don't even want to use it to rinse your mouth out because the taste is so overwhelmingly obnoxious. After filtration TDS reads as 0 - my meter isn't sensitive enough to measure whatever is managing to get through. BTW, a TDS of 7 is more than enough for water to taste shitty to me. Of course, TDS isn't the whole story - it depends exactly what's in the water, not just how much is in the water. Some well water probably has TDS way higher than 7 and tastes fine.)
Oh, and of course this article is retarded for many reasons - but just to name one of them: If I bought bottled water from the store rather than filtering my own, I would be conserving a lot of water (relative to my drinking/cooking water, not so much relative to total usage). Single-stage reverse-osmosis systems like mine that run off the municipal water pressure (rather than using a powered pump and multiple stages) waste 80% of the water you put in - it literally goes right down the drain. Commercial systems can do much better than that. (I doubt walmart is doing reverse osmosis though. But even so, just skipping most of the crappy pipe-work helps immensely - the published data for my city's reservoirs isn't even close to what comes out of my tap. If it were I probably wouldn't even need to filter my water at all.)
I buy water from Walmart [or other stores] because of the waste of a home RO system. The thing to look for on the label is that the water is RO 'treated" and is from out of state. Why out of state? Because Federal law as to labeling applies in interstate commerce, but not in intrastate commerce. Keep in mind that your tap water is most likely treated with fluoride, RO removes it.
Locally Kroger has most of it's water "filtered" but not RO, meaning it's filtered tap water. It is generally from in-state as well.
One interesting thing I have noticed, TPTB are busy telling the people in Africa how to remove fluoride from water, while fluoridating water in the first world. Redistribution of IQ or just plain old IQ leveling?
TPTB need their slaves smart enough to do useful work, but dumb enough that they don't revolt.
(Though, to be honest, even though the water in my current town is not fluoridated, the people here don't really seem any less dumb than those in other places I have lived. Any effect from fluoride is likely too small to casually notice when the dumbness of the average person is already so massive.)
Well people with a higher average IQ need more flouride than a population with an average IQ of 80.
If IQ gets much lower than 80 a human cannot function in an industrial society.
Once America gets down to an average of 80 (well on our way with immigration, subsidizing baby mammas, GMOs, vaccines, flouride, geo enginnering et al) it;ll be all unicorns, rainbows and bunnies.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Don't worry. The invisible hand of the market will correct any wrong doing.
Arrest the Walton family and send them to the FEMA camps. Redistribute their stolen wealth. They've been added to the Q99x2 pyramid list.
Is that really their profit after the bottling and transport? Hard to believe. The absurdity of buying and bottling water in Sacremento is not lost on me though.
Anybody who buys bottled water deserves to get fleeced. It's tap water that just sits around in plastic bottles on shelves and isn't even that good for you. Only makes sense in countries with suspect water.
The estrogens in the plastic bottles are turning people that drink water from plastic bottles into pansies,or into having chronic PMS. It doesn't help the women either.
US consumers awe me ... in the kind and degree to which they can be suckered ... again and again and again ... there is no blaming WalMart for this, its the good citizens of the country lining up and begging to be fucked over again and again and again ... I still cannot believe that people actually PAY MONEY for tv's to brainwash them, and then pay more for cable service ...they protested against national ID cards but now they all rush out to Apple to BUY the latest tracking device plus RENT the service which records not only their exact location at all times but who their friends are, who their commercial contacts are, what they are buying, what they are looking for, and just about everything they are thinking about ...
Well, it's not the poor drinking bottled water. Point the blame at the suburbanites, metrosexuals, MICs and the like. Wal Mart is only filling their demand.
Wait a second, here. D S Services is a private company. Walmart buys from them. This is not Walmart making a huge profit on Sacramento water.
I thought Krieger was better than this.
i dont think the consumer understands bottled water....... i dont think the average amerikan is capable of a logical choice.... obama is the proof
This article was obviously written by somebody who has never run a business or taken Business 101. The price paid for the water is the Cost Of Goods (COG). Other costs, which are ignored in this article, like bottling costs, shipping, insurance, wages, taxes, maintenance, security, management, advertising, etc. are never mentioned.
Walmart does not make a 65,724% profit.
they'll never understand rody
they'll never understand rody