Discussion Main / BrandNamesAreBetter

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• There have been some quality control issues with some generic prescription medications that have made the news however.
• Note that generic drugs must legally (at least in the U.S.) match the amount of the drug absorbed and the peak blood concentration of the name-brand drug within 80-125% accuracy. That's okay for most drugs, but for some drugs that have small doses and/or require very specific dosages, such as medications for seizures and thyroid disorders, that small variation can be very dangerous.

• Spell Evian backwards. (It's a coincidence, but hilariously appropriate nonetheless.)
• Some spring water brands do actually have a subjectively better taste (or, more specifically, lack of bad taste) than tap water, and when available they are usually cheaper than Dasani, Evian, or Aquafina (which are all straight from the hose, then "filtered").

• The phrase "designer water" has sprung up for any basic product that's being pretentiously labeled, overpriced, and sold as if it wasn't still the basic product. Taken literally in the case of some brands of bottled water, such as Voss. It comes in a glass bottle and is sold in high-class stores like Nordstom's for $30 a bottle or more. But no matter how pretty it is, in the end it's just water. In point of fact, several of the higher priced bottled waters come directly from municipal sources (tapwater, in other words) with no further processing.
  • The television comedy Only Fools And Horses played on this whole issue with bottled water - and in 2004 the UK press revealed it to be Truth in Television in Dasani's case.
    • For non-Brit tropers, the reason Dasani crashed and burned in the UK is because it turned out that they really were just bottling and selling tap water. Part of the problem is that, being part of the Coca-Cola brand, they tried to brazen through it instead of just admitting it was a fair cop, and insisted that they were making the water better by purifying it. This meant that the water board immediately leapt on them and started issuing indignant statements that there was nothing wrong with the water that came out of the tap, it certainly did not need purifying before drinking, and if Dasani were trying to imply that it did, they'd be quite happy to take them to court to show them the error of their ways. The thing just dragged on and on, with most people caught between outrage and amusement at the whole business. The best part, though, was the fact that with the show being a bit of a British comedy standard, pretty much everyone has seen the Only Fools And Horses episode mentioned above, which involved the boys try to sell tap water under the name "Peckham Spring", Peckham being the part of London in which they resided. Guess where the Dasani factory was, where they'd been bottling the water. For the press, it was like all their Christmases had come at once, it was a PR disaster on an epic scale, and Coke eventually ended up pulling the whole brand from the UK market. Even now, watch carefully if you open a bottle of Dasani in front of a Brit. They might not tell the story, but they'll almost certainly grin.
    • They were also adding calcium chloride (containing safe levels of bromine) to the water and using ozone to oxidise it. This also oxidised the bromine, meaning the final product contained around twice the legal limit for bromate (a known carcinogen). The case was about a lot more than just bottling tap water for profit.
    • Made slightly funnier by the fact the exact same pollution thing happened in the Only Fools And Horses episode thanks to Del and co dumping toxic waste in the reservoir.
  • There are some good reasons to drink bottled water, such as if your water supply is contaminated, you need distilled water for a medical device, your water has off tastes, or you are travelling, among other things. For medical devices you need distilled, not spring or other fancy water and might as well get the cheapest you can get, while for drinking cheap refillable jugs are just fine, or a filter, depending on your water quality. That said, expensive name brand water has been shown in numerous tests to neither taste better nor be healthier than tap water, though depending on where you live your tap water might not taste as good; most of these tests are apparently done with New York City water, which is apparently pretty good. In fact, some spring waters have been shown to have dangerously high levels of bacteria and chemicals.
  • An element of We All Live in America here - not everywhere has safe-to-drink tap water. For instance, even many locals don't drink the tap water in Russia. St Petersburg is especially bad - the parts of the plumbing are as old as the city itself, the city is built on top of nasty marshland (which is now also full of industrial pollution) and in parts of the city the tap water is yellow. Siberian towns, like Ust Nera, are even worse. In such circumstances, always buy spring water, especially if you are a tourist.
    • This is the case in China, as well, where most people boil water before they drink it. Because of this, foreigners almost always prefer to just buy bottled water and drink it, or buy a couple of higher-quality bottles and cool them down with water from a boiler.

Placebotol, good for what ills you.

Jack Butler: Blurgle, you miss the point of the trope with your anti-generic rant.