Wal-Mart Profits Off California's Thirst

I grew up in California, very near Folsom Lake — that’s it up there, with diminishing water levels due to drought — and we’d spend our Summers there, boating, swimming, sunning, drinking, getting into trouble. And I can remember the water levels at the lake sometimes being very low and complaining about the trek across the beach, then the dirt to reach the shoreline as it drifted further and further away.

First world problems, I know, but for me back then,it was just kids having fun and having our good times ruined. But it isn’t fun out there now, with water levels at the lowest they have ever been and much of California on water restrictions, which is why this story infuriates me …

Wal-Mart is bottling Sacramento water to sell in their stores; water from the very area, farmland, the Central Valley of California, that has been hard hit by the drought. Wal-Mart is making a profit off Sacramento water.

And it works like this:

Sacramento sells water to a bottler, DS Services of America, at 99 cents for every 748 gallons — the same rate as other commercial and residential customers — and that water is then bottled and sold at Wal-Mart for 88 cents per gallon, meaning that $1 of water from Sacramento turns into $658.24 for Wal-Mart and DS Services.

Water California seriously needs, but Wal-Mart makes a ginormous profit from; and this comes on the heels of an announcement last month that the city is asking residents to cut water consumption by a whopping 36%.

You cannot water your gardens; you cannot wash your car; you cannot, and yeah, it’s another first world problem, fill up your pool. But Wal-Mart can make a killing while Californians, and their lands, go thirsty.

If you needed another reason to lathe the Wal-Mart Corporate Greed Machine — and I don’t — then this surely must be it.

Daily Kos