Funny you had your experience with a bottle of water. I travel quite a bit domestically and use the price of a 1L bottle of water as a proxy for how expensive a given area is. A common extreme would be the bottle of water I regularly bought in the Denver airport at $2.59 will set you back $6.07 in the Burbank, CA airport. And of course, the same bottle of water at Walmart is just under a dollar.
Some of the variance, I expect is directly a result of the cost of doing business in a given jurisdiction. But, someone, somewhere determines the sales price and the avarice behind it seems obvious. Or just stupid.
Reading recently about the incident in the Houston area where a Best Buy charged ~$42 for a case of water, the official explanation was that they had no clear pricing for a case and the cashier simply multiplied the single unit price by 24. Was it greed or just plain stupidity (and lack of common sense)? Regretfully, if we consider the quality our schools are churning out these days, the truth may indeed be the latter, even though greed makes for an eye-catching headline and feeds the injustice trolls.
[sigh]
What a great and well thought out post. Your water meter for understanding how expensive and area is is fascinating. Perhaps it could be the subject of a thesis!
I have thought of that on occasion. For now it will have to stay on my "to-do" list which is longer than I like.