They draw incredible amounts of water from several systems throughout the country because people with perfectly good tap water buy cases of the stuff every week as their sole source of drinking water.
You say this as if it were a fact, but no evidence has been provided to support this. This is a general issue with online communities, lowers the quality of discourse, and makes it hard to come to a consensus.
So... here's one reference I found [1]. The paper tries to correlate perceived quality of local water supply and consumption of bottled water. They found that 13.4% of users used bottled water as their primary source of water. The paper contains many other interesting data points for example:
"When all other conditions were exactly equal, a respondent who was one year older in age was about 2% less likely to use bottled water as the primary source of drinking water. From a gender standpoint, the odds that a female uses bottled water for primary drinking source are 1.32 times as much as the odds for a male, with all other conditions being equal. Education level was not a significant predictor for bottled water use."
Either bottle water use decreases with age, or bottle water use is more popular among the new generations, and can be expected to increase with time. It would be useful to have data about this.
However, using bottled water as your primary source of water is still somewhat niche. I'm not sure it's a good indicator of the decline of American society, as was suggested.
Also:
> More often than not, people buying that Nestle water live in places where the tap has better scores than where the water was bottled in the first place.
The data appears to show that the majority of people buying bottled water, do not do so as their primary source of water. And are perhaps more likely just engaged in casual consumption (or while traveling etc as suggested).
b) Wrote "sole source of drinking water", not "primary source of water". They're not bathing in Nestle... yet.
c) Literally everyone I know goes through a case of the stuff every week. Anecdotal, I know. Sue me.
I'm pretty sure not everyone reads the same news sites... in any case, most new reporting is pretty poor. But referencing it, would at least provide a starting point for discussion.
> b) Wrote "sole source of drinking water", not "primary source of water". They're not bathing in Nestle... yet.
If you read the article I referenced the question as asked is "Do you primarily purchase bottled water for your drinking water?". So yes, this is about drinking water. I mistakenly assumed that was clear from the context.
> c) Literally everyone I know goes through a case of the stuff every week. Anecdotal, I know. Sue me.
Yes, this is not useful as a discussion point. If you have a link to a survey or other reference that's useful. It's possible that things have changed since the 2011 article I posted.
I’m not talking about “standard” water though. San Francisco gets water from snowmelt so it has noticeably less contaminants than most water supplies. It routinely ranks among the top few water sources in the United States
"You guys have the best water that we tested. Period," Snyder said of San Francisco's drinking water. "I don't think we've ever tested drinking water that didn't have any of our target compounds in it."
https://www.google.com/amp/www.sfgate.com/green/amp/S-F-s-ta...
Knew one person who found out his sewage pipes were somehow mingling with his fresh water ones this way. How that even happens, I do not know...