I did a stupid thing the last time my wife and I went to the movies: I bought water.

It didn’t seem stupid at the time. I wanted something to drink, but I didn’t want caffeine or a lot of sugar, so water made sense.  I asked the guy behind the concession stand counter for an ice water, and he offered me a bottle instead.  Surely it must be cheaper than buying a Coke? 

Before I knew it, I was shelling out $3.00 for a 20 oz. bottle of water.  A whole $0.25 less than if I would have bought a coke.

I didn’t think about it much until we sat down in the theater I started doing the math:  20 oz. bottle of water… 32 oz in a quart… 4 quarts to a gallon…  equals 6.4 of my bottles of water per gallon.

Put the one above the six, bring down the decimal point…  $19.20 per gallon of that fresh, clear water.

Taking my little exercise a little further:  There are 42 gallons in a “barrel”, the unit by which crude oil is sold.

A little more mental math:  $806.40 per barrel of that fresh, clear movie theater water.

That makes crude oil seem pretty cheap at $60 per barrel, at least when you account for my economic stupidity.

I then became even more curious as to how much money I really threw away.  I pulled out my last water bill from the city, and calculated that 42 gallons of water cost me $0.11 coming out of my faucet. So, effectively, throwing out the cost of the packaging, I over paid for that bottle of water by $2.89.

So we are complaining about oil and gas prices, but consumers will pay $3.00 at a movie theater for something they can pay eleven cents for at home, and lets face it, I’m not the only one buying bottled water at the movie theater.

The real irony slapped me in the face when we left the theater:  There on the wall less than 8 feet from the concession stand, in all its glory… 

…a water fountain.

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