Why VOSS is so not BOSS

Why+VOSS+is+so+not+BOSS

It seems the Staples’ cafeteria has just caught on to the fact that students will pay anything to look cool.

As of yesterday, the cafeteria introduced VOSS Water so that students who feel Dasani and Smart Water are just too, well, common, can pay 25 to 50 cents more and get water with a superiority complex attached to it.

Shipped all the way from Norway, VOSS (because it’s so important it requires full capitalization), is marketed as just that: “water from Norway.”

So what’s the deal then? Why should you be paying more money for less water you may wonder? The company’s website claims that “the unprocessed nature of the water, and its high level of purity gives it its fresh, clean, quality taste.”

But water is water. I can’t tell the difference between the three brands, and I would bet you can’t either.

But still, I see VOSS waters being daintily sipped all throughout the Staples cafeteria. My theory is that the bottles’ cylindrical shape and monochromatic grey packaging help give off the vibe that because you chose VOSS, you’re just better than everyone else in the room. In other words, as a consumer, your blatant disregard for the environment and financial indifference are overlooked because, hey, it looks cool.

Jokes aside, this is unacceptable. The bottomline is the cafeteria shouldn’t be encouraging students to buy bottled water in the first place. They need to raise prices and limit options because students need to start bringing their own reusable water bottles instead of wasting plastic ones. You don’t have to take an AP Environmental course to understand that it’s just plain wasteful to buy bottled water.

Making bottles to meet America’s demand for bottled water uses more than 17 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel 1.3 million cars for a year, according to the Pacific Institute for Research.

I don’t know about other parts of the country, but at least on the East Coast, there’s no reason to drink bottled water because our tap water meets and exceeds government standards. In addition, at least at Staples, we have water filters that further purify our water.

The cafeteria is taking advantage of Staples’ students seemingly bottomless bank accounts and superficial tendencies for the sake of profit. So that puts it on us, the students, to just say no.

In 2013 we spent, as a country, $11.8 billion on bottled water according to Beverage Marketing Corporation. I’m told that if you lift up one of the VOSS water bottles, or any bottled water for that matter, and hold it to your ear, you can hear the faint sound of billions of dollars being carelessly thrown into the garbage.

But only if you listen really, really carefully.