Profiteering

I was arguing with a friend about this just the other day. The argument concerned the cost of water and in particular, recycled water.

A 25,000 litre truck can be filled with recycled water for about $25. If I wanted that water to be delivered to my house, it’ll cost me in excess of $2000. I know this because I watched a short article not long ago about a water carter and it seems to be true enough with my enquiry to fill a 1000lt tank resulting in a cost estimate of about $100. When they asked him why he charged so much for the water, he said “People pay it if they want the water” which translates to “because I can”. At that point I wanted to take a gun and shoot the fool.



I mentioned this to my mate and he said “So what’s wrong with that?” I tried to point out that it offers a disincentive to which he said “Bullshit!”. I damn near fell off my bike, but you can’t argue with that kind of logic, so I didn’t.

The markup here is about 8000%. That, in anyone’s language (except my mate’s) is profiteering on a grandiose scale, and he can do it because there are no laws to prevent it. The thing that really irked me about this bloke was that he was quite happy to charge up to $3000 for 25,000 litres of recycled water to fill a pool, but was prepared to drop it to $2500 if you are trying to grow food or own a business that needs it and don’t have a tap yet. Big hearted of him I thought.

Not long after, my brother in law was around for a barby and told the story of his mate. This bloke had recently had an 85,000 litre pool installed. Of course, he didn’t have the $8000 needed to do the right thing and fill it with recycled water, so he rang the water company and told them an engineer had just told him he had to fill the pool or it would collapse, but he couldn’t afford the recycled water. So without so much as a “can we see the engineer’s report please”, they told him to turn the tap on. $80 later he had an 85,000 litre pool full of beautiful, clear, sparkling, pristine drinking water.

Now in a state that’s having serious water issues, with stage 3a water restrictions in force, which means we not allowed to fill pools, no matter the size, we can’t water lawns or gardens at all, trees can only have a bucket twice a week, etc, I think that deceiving the water company like that is probably a bit rude, so shame on him. But double shame on the carter for making it prohibitively expensive NOT to deceive the water company.

But once again, this is the problem and the result of our “profit at all costs!” society. Profits soar as prices rise and the economy booms and we have good times. Then slowly it creeps up, because in the final analysis, one man’s gain is another man’s loss, and then it hits and a wave of home buyers go bust. Usually it’s because they’ve over extended themselves, but where was the check to make sure they didn’t, or the check to stop the unscrupulous mortgage broker? Well they’ve been removed because they interfere with profit.

We seem to talk a lot about silly people buying things they can’t afford and somehow manage to almost completely avoid talking about the smart people who convinced them to do it and these days, that's business. It no longer has anything to do with the usefulness or value of a product, but everything to do with whether you and I can be convinced to buy it. Why we do that I don’t know. It seems all ass about to me but then I’m not profit driven, except where my employer is concerned and that’s only because I’ve seen the workplace change so drastically over the years. There was a time I was treated like a person, now I’m treated like a commodity so I’ll do my best to act like one.