Ethos Water - Bullshit

For a long time I have gone to Starbucks and seen the Ethos water on display.  Never before moving to Pasadena have I seen this be such a big seller.  People here tend to buy their morning coffee and grab a water for later it seems.

I've always had a pretty big problem with this water and their advertising.  They call it Ethos water, they say every bottle helps people who need water, but there's a limit.  They charge $1.80 for a bottle of water that anywhere else would be much cheaper.  If they said that 100% of the profits went to this global initiative to provide water to poor countries then I would say fine, call yourself Ethos, but only $0.05 goes to helping these organizations.  There is a huge amount of profit being kept by a company that is selling under a charitable pretense.

Going to the Ethos water web-site I discovered that they were purchased and now fully owned by Starbucks, and basically have a commitment to provide $10 million to this water initiative and the $0.05 is going into that fund.  Essentially Starbucks has committed to a $10M donation and will get a deduction for it whenever they contribute it to a foundation (they may already have contributed it to take the deduction) and many other companies do similar things with much less back-patting.  I think that it's pretty dishonest and sad.

There was a show on TV of kids selling lemonade, and one team decided to charge $2/cup but said that "profits were going to charity" while the other team just sold under a normal strategy around $1/cup.  The irony here was that everything was going to charity because the show had provided them with all the supplies and the kids only motivation was to make the most, which is why one went with a lower price.  Turns out the kids who advertised for charity made the most profit and sold the most cups.  People were handing them $20 and saying they didn't want any lemonade.  It said a lot about people's intentions, but companies have been abusing this for a long time as well. 

The pink lid Yoplait yogurts that are supposed to help breast cancer are a shining example of this.  Yoplait advertises that $0.10 will be contributed for each lid sent in.  The fine print says that they're already committed to giving $500k (5M lids) and the max is $1.5M donation.  I'm sure they know exactly how many yogurts they sell so this really isn't an effort on their part to do anything but push their product for a slight social benefit (of which they benefit the most).  I wish that companies wouldn't be so self-congratulatory when it is so clear that what they do is designed only for their own benefit.

So let's get real Starbucks... Ethos = Profits.