The price you're quoting from your utility likely includes water treatment, transport of the water to your home, transport of wastewater from your home, and wastewater treatment. I would be surprised if you're paying anything significant for the water itself.

It very well may be that Nestle (and many other companies) are under-paying for their water rights, but I don't think you're comparing apples to apples.

Have to agree. The greatest terminology blunder made in the modern world has been to talk about "water rates", "water charges" or even mentioning "water" in this regard. We should always be talking about Pipes.

Disclaimer: Nestle are utterly evil

> I entirely fail to see why Nestle should get a huge discount for water that is then sold to American citizens at $1.79 a gallon, for a 122,976% markup.

Well, when you phrase it that way it sounds terrible, but it's a completely bogus comparison. A retail water user is paying not just for the water but more importantly for it's storage and delivery to their doorstep. That increasers the price. You also are not buying in bulk. If you were, you would only be paying $50-200 an acre foot as most California farmers do to have water stored and delivered to their farms. Nestle is only paying for access to a water source. Is $524 too low a fee for a permit? Yeah, probably, but the company isn't "stealing" water, and compared to what farmers pay for similar amounts of water isn't not that that different.

That water would cost you $300K because your utility has to source it, store it for year-round availability, pipe it from remote mountain streams to your house, maintain all of that pipe, keep it clean, bill you, occasionally collect past-due balances from your neighbors, maitain a customer service center, employ unionized pipeline maintenance crews, buy the heavy equipment used by those crews, maintain that equipment, pay the unionized mechanics who maintain that heavy equipment, employ a security team to protect the safety of the system, etc., etc., etc. Running a public utility and running a bottling plant aren't the same sport.