Thread by @patio11

Can I sing the praises of ice water with fruit in it as a business innovation? This is one of those minor magical marvels.

Water is healthy compared to almost anything else people drink. The fruit adds a tiny bit of taste, functionally no positive or negative nutritional impact, but *crucially* it makes people value the water above their standard anchoring for water, which is "abundant and free."

If you were preparing this at home it would be a slog, so you don't do it unless you have people to do it.

But preparing it in quantity is *extremely* easy, and if you have people (like a business does), literally anyone can make a day's worth of it in early morning downtime.

And since the anchor point for water is free, and the true cost of this to a business rounds to free, but this drink feels somewhat exclusive, businesses aspiring to have cachet with health-conscious people just make it abundantly available for free as a branding thing.

This product appears to be filtering (ba dum bum?) into the consumer market, with bottled water-with-some-amount-of-juice-provided-flavor, for people who realize the taste of this helps them prioritize water.

Which will, ironically, probably result in less of it in businesses.

Oddly enough I think we're rediscovering a drink which was likely widely available to a social class hundreds of years ago which entirely went out of fashion and now is back again, essentially unmodified as a product but with sharply different production/distribution behind it.

In a related businesses-giving-out-free-beverages I was just in a major US bank branch (for silly reasons) and saw a customer-facing coffee pot, which I don't think I'd ever seen before, explicitly labeled "Compliments of $BANK. Please serve yourself."

And, funny enough, there is a microscopic copy choice there that I bet brand marketing folks argued about for days: do we put the bank's name in there, or do we say "Compliments of the bank."

The second phrasing is one which feels to me like a stodgy, old-money, you're-here-for-life-and-everyone-knows-it vibe.

The first sounds like a bank trying to get mobile customers to remember where they actually bank.

I am probably weird on this score, but I actually like the "the bank" alternative a little more. It suggests that the bank sees itself like e.g. my tiny bank in Japan sees itself, a pillar of the community that would not dream of suggesting to a depositor they were a customer.