Slashdot Mirror
Nestle Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For (bloomberg.com)
Nestle, the world's largest food and beverage company, has been bottling water since 1843 and has grown into the largest seller of bottled water. But a detailed report on Bloomberg uncovers the company's operation in Michigan, revealing that Nestle has come to dominate in the industry in part by going into economically depressed areas with lax water laws. It makes billions selling a product for which it pays close to nothing. Find the Bloomberg Businessweek article here (it might be paywalled, here's an alternative source).
Yeah - the article paints Nestle as evil but gives the city leaders a total pass for charging only a $200 extraction fee.
Either the city leaders are completely incompetent and should be kicked out or they took kickbacks in someway and should be kicked out and imprisoned.
My only thought is that the city leaders decided it'd be worth the cost in terms of jobs and increased tax dollars to the city (which this article pooh-poohs as not worthwhile to research). I know a nearby town has a nestle plant and it's been a boon for the survival of the town.
When Limbaugh says you don't need to buy bottled water, just use some old bottles and store tap water, he gets called a heartless jerk. OK he is that, but it was perfectly good advice. It doesn't require purchasing high priced water, and saves throwing out used bottles.
When Nestle sells bottled water, which many people bought before the last few hurricanes, they are painted as heartless jerks.
So bad to do, bad to not do, bad to stay frozen in place, run, don't run, you're wrong no matter what. Is this is the American way, or are you all just a bunch of heartless jerks.
This is getting fucking Orwellian folks.
I'm not sure if Nestle makes billions, either. At this point it's not worth looking (I'm not about to sit down and tackle this problem right now), especially since Nestle's practices are known-harmful and how much they make off them is irrelevant.
Still, on the subject of how much a company makes: the gross profits are often the subject of discussion when we want to attack a business for price gouging, or for any other reason. A Wendy's franchise, for example, charges twice as much for a hamburger as the cost of the burger flipper, the burger maker, the gas, the grease, and the burger itself; yet the franchise makes an 8% average yearly profit.
Net profits include a lot of organization and things like rent and power, while gross profits skip all that and just focus on what specifically went into the assembly of a product. You also get things like the cost-of-risk, which ends you with e.g. Eli Lily making some 40% profits one year and -21% profits another year, with a five-year average of around 12% (not small, but not egregious). It's a great narrative in the prescription drug debate to call out Lily for making 40% profits [one year], or to point out that those pills cost 11 cents to manufacture; it just happens to be lies told entirely by careful arrangement of true facts.
So does Nestle have billions in revenues, or enormous revenues and billions in profits?
(The problem with seeking the truth--or maybe the best part, depending on your perspective--is you'll routinely say things that make someone on every point on the political spectrum squirm around a lot. Sometimes they throw things at you because they don't like having those thoughts.)
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