If Gas Were Priced Like Bottled Water, a Fill-up Would Cost $61,000

Gas hit $4.09 a gallon mid-July, according to AAA — up more than 20% from a year ago. People are furious. I’ve heard about it at the gym, at the grocery store and from my wife.

Now let me tell you about a liquid you’re buying for the equivalent of $4,090 a gallon without making a peep.

It’s water.

Seattle Public Utilities puts it in writing: Bottled water can cost up to 1,000 times what tap water costs. Their tap runs less than a penny a gallon. Bottled averages about $1.50.

Apply that same multiple to your gas tank. At 1,000 times the pump price, gas would run roughly $4,090 a gallon. Filling a 15-gallon tank would cost about $61,000.

You’d never pay it. You’d film it and post it. You’d call your congressman.

But you’ll grab a bottle of water at the register and not blink, because it’s only two bucks.

That’s the trick, and it works on all of us. Sellers slice the product small enough that the per-unit insanity disappears. Nobody buys ink by the gallon or water by the tanker, so nobody ever runs the math.

I ran it. Here are six things you’re wildly overpaying for, with the numbers to prove it.

1. Bottled water: Up to 1,000 times more than gas

We covered the headline number above. Here’s the part that should really sting.

A large share of bottled water is municipal tap water that’s been run through a filter and given a picture of a mountain. You’re buying the same water your city already sold you, plus a plastic bottle and a marketing budget.

If you don’t like how your tap tastes, a $30 filter pitcher fixes that permanently. A case of bottled water fixes it until Thursday.

I broke down the full con in this article.

2. Printer ink: Roughly 3,000 times the price of gas

Consumer Reports ran replacement cartridges through its labs. The cheapest ink came out around $13 an ounce. The priciest hit about $95 an ounce, which works out to $12,160 a gallon.

Set that next to the $4.09 gas that has everyone freaking out. Your printer drinks something roughly 3,000 times more expensive.

Consumer Reports also noted the cheap stuff costs more than twice as much per ounce as Dom Perignon. You are not buying champagne. You are buying tinted water to print a boarding pass.

The kicker is that it doesn’t have to cost that. A reservoir-style printer refills from a bottle at about $4 an ounce — roughly 24 times cheaper for the same job.

Same manufacturers. Same ink. The container is the entire scam.

3. Coffee at the counter: About 15 times more than home-brewed

Coffee prices are genuinely awful right now. Ground coffee hit $9.72 a pound in April, the highest the Bureau of Labor Statistics has recorded since it started tracking in 1980, and sat at $9.46 in June.

Here’s the thing nobody mentions. A pound brews roughly 40 cups. Even at an all-time record price, coffee in your kitchen costs under a quarter a cup.

The average cup at a shop ran $3.57, according to Toast menu data reported by CNBC.

So you’re handing over $3.57 for about 24 cents of coffee. The other $3.33 buys rent, labor and a cup with your name spelled wrong.

One thing before we keep going — the financial world is louder and dumber than ever. Hot takes everywhere. Almost none of it is worth your time. I’ve spent 35+ years cutting through the noise so you don’t have to. Sign up for the free Money Talks Newsletter — 10 seconds, no spam, just the stuff that matters.

4. Brand-name drugs: About 6 times more than generic

The Federal Trade Commission, citing U.S. Food and Drug Administration estimates, says generic drugs contain the same active ingredients as the brand-name version and typically cost 80% to 85% less.

Flip it around: The brand costs roughly six times more for chemically identical medicine.

This is the one on the list with serious money attached. Nobody spends $2,000 a year on bottled water. Plenty of people spend that on prescriptions, and a lot of them are seniors on fixed incomes who assume the pricier pill works better.

It doesn’t. The FDA requires generics to perform the same way in your body.

Ask your doctor to write for generics, and ask the pharmacist for the cash price — it sometimes beats your insurance copay. Discover more tactics in “11 Ways to Save on Prescription Drugs.”

5. Movie theater snacks: 5.6 times more than it costs

I pulled Cinemark’s audited 2024 financials for this one, because the popcorn numbers you see online are nonsense nobody can source.

For its U.S. theaters, Cinemark booked $969.3 million in concession revenue against $174.5 million in concession supplies.

That’s snacks sold for 5.6 times what they cost, an 82% gross margin. Software companies dream about margins like that. Cinemark gets them on corn.

One more figure from that filing floored me. Cinemark’s U.S. concessions brought in $7.89 per customer against a $10.03 average ticket.

The snacks nearly cost as much as the movie. That’s not a quirk — it’s the whole business. The film is bait.

6. Name brands over store brands: Up to 3 times more than generic

Smallest gap on the list, easiest to close.

Store brands typically run about 40% below the national brand, and on some items — sports drinks, cereal, ketchup — the gap hits 70%. At the wide end you’re paying triple for the label.

Now the part that should really irritate you: The same manufacturers frequently produce both. Same plant, same line, different box, triple the price.

Store brands don’t win every time, so glance at the unit price on the shelf tag instead of assuming. We keep a running list of products you should always buy generic.

Why you keep falling for it

Look at what these six have in common. Not one of them asks you to accept a worse product.

Filtered tap water tastes the same. Generic atorvastatin is the same as brand-name Lipitor. A tank printer prints identically. Store-brand ketchup came out of the same vat as the famous stuff.

You’re not paying extra for quality. You’re paying extra for packaging, shelf position and a logo — and you’re paying it in slices small enough that your brain never adds them up.

So add them up. Buy the filter. Buy the tank printer. Ask for generics.

Then go to the movies and buy the popcorn anyway, because life is short and you just funded it with everything you stopped wasting.

Just don’t order the bottled water with it. At $4,090 a gallon, that’s between you and your conscience.

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