For months, the bottled-water industry has been losing its grip over people's pocketbooks. Consumers are realizing that buying purified tap water at pumped-up prices, packaged in little plastic bottles, makes zero sense in economic, ecological, or health terms.
Now the industry appears to be losing its grip on reality. From the Miami Herald:
In the radio ad, a talking faucet extols Miami-Dade's tap water as cheaper, purer and safer than bottled water. It may have sounded innocuous to most listeners, but the 30-second spot left the nation's largest purveyor of bottled water boiling mad. Nestle Waters North America, which makes nearly $4 billion a year selling Zephyrhills and other brands, is threatening to sue if the county doesn't kill commercials the company brands as false advertising.
Ha. Does the transnational giant really think it's going to win consumers by bullying their utility?
This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!
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Russ Posted 12:05 am
14 Oct 2008
But as we saw with the McLibel case and the veggie libel law flap with Oprah, the moment cases like this surface on the media radar it's a PR disaster for the corporate thugs.
What should be needless to say, at least in America (though not in Britain, where mcdonald's technically "won" the Mclibel case) we have the 1st amendment. But these kinds of laws and lawsuits are an attempted end-run around that. And with all the right-wing judges who have been planted like explosive charges over the last 25+ years, the goons can sometimes make legal if not PR headway.
Right now in NJ we have an outrageous case, where the trial court and the initial review court have upheld a municipal law which allows businesses to display any kind of inflated thing, but which forbids any "disruptive" inflations being used as political speech. (In this case, a union was fined for putting up a giant inflated rat at a protest. They're appealing, of course.)
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Erik Hoffner Posted 3:38 am
14 Oct 2008
Erik
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Tasermons Partner Posted 3:53 am
14 Oct 2008
Go ahead and let Nestle waste their money.
It'll only draw more attention to the issue and get more people to realize what a rip-off bottled water can be.
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