bicycle.net -- cycling news, product reviews, original essays, podcasts & video :: beijing olympics 2008

First, this isn’t an advertisement.  It’s just math.  Second, relax — YOU don’t even have to do the math.  

Cutting to the chase, you can go to your local market right now, if it’s open, and buy Gatorade, for example, for a couple bucks a bottle, or get the exact same Gatorade for less than twenty cents.  No strings.  No lie.  Read on.

We all know convenience comes at a price.  But at what price, exactly, we wonder.  Like when you want a drink NOW, not, like, in one minute.  So you grab the premixed bottle off the refrigerated shelf and drop a buck and a half, or two maybe, and get a tall dose of cold sugar water to pound down.

But if you could get it for a big discount, I mean like 80-90% off, would you be willing to go so far as to – I hesitate to say – add water?

I know, I know.  There’s all that effort to find a faucet, and turn the handle, and god knows you’ll have to shake or stir – but stay with me here for a few moments.

Coming back from Target today, I had in my little plastic sack (don’t worry, we recycle religiously, and sometimes not just on Sundays) an 18 ounce tub of Gatorade mix for which I’d paid $3.79, and a box of 8 1-ounce “pouches” of the same sugar/salt mix (the little pouches are really convenient to carry while you’re out riding and need to refill a bottle).  The box of pouches cost me $2.99.  

I knew – because I’m like Mensa-good at math, or better — that the “tub” had to be the better buy, ounce for ounce.  But that got me wondering how much of a difference there might be (I hadn’t taken the time in the grocery aisle at Tarjay to apply my Mensa powers because I was already solving multiple quadratic equations to relax my mind).  So when I got home I decided to figure it out.  Sure, I used Excel to do the calcs – but that’s because I’m so good at math I wanted to make sure Microsoft could do it, too.  

In any case, I broadened the analysis to include not just pouches and tubs of dry mix, but also 20 and 24-ounce bottles of premixed, for which I got case-prices off of bizrate where 24 24-ounce bottles (I know that’s confusing if you’re not Mensa, like me) costs $50.79, or a little more than $2/bottle.  

For a case of the smaller 20-ounce bottles, the price on bizrate was $27.50, or about a buck and a quarter per bottle.  These prices sounded “normal” to me, though I’ve certainly paid more than $1.25 when I bought just a single, rather than by the case.

Anyhoo, to get this all on an equivalent basis, I assumed that I was buying this stuff to fill my “bidons” — because, in fact, that’s why I went to Tarjay in the first place.  My bidons hold about 14 ounces each, for what it’s worth.  [I know, yours hold more, you say, but let's not get into that unless we down some beers and put up a few bucks, okay?].

So the case of 24 24-ounce bottles, for example, gives 576 ounces (applying the Pythagorean theorem, natch), or enough to fill 41 of my bike bottles.   The box of pouches, by contrast, only has enough powder to fill 10 of my bidons.  

Now the magic of math kicks in, because when I divide those prices I mentioned before, and the number of ounces I get from each of these four options (24 oz and 20 oz bottles, the pouches, and the tub), I get the following results:

• Filling my bike bottles from a 24 oz bottle of Gatorade would cost me $1.23

• From a 20-ounce bottle, the cost to fill my bike bottles would be only $0.80 [note, it’s curious why the smaller bottles actually have a lower price per ounce – usually it works the other way around.  Ask Mr. Gatorade to explain that one.]

• Now, as to my convenient little pouches, of which I could easily stuff all 8 in one pocket on my jersey and stay sugared and salted for a couple days, what I’m paying to fill a 14 ounce bike bottle this way (remember, I gotta provide the water) is a mere 31 cents.  Now this is certainly good.  But wait, it gets better.

• Provided I bit the bullet about providing my own water out of the faucet, if I use the mix out of my tub, I get 14 ounces of Gatorade for a whopping 18 cents. 

Okay, so there’s my geometric proof that convenience costs you about a buck a bottle, and conversely, if you are enough of a cheapskate to put forth your own agua, you can basically have all the Gatorade you want if not quite for free, then for less than the change resting beneath your couch cushions.  

And don’t get me started about the environmental impacts of all those plastic bottles, and the fuel to drive trucks weighed down with heavy cases of premixed drinks, and so on.  

Until next time, I’m off to the beach to contemplate String Theory, if you know what I mean.  And I know you do.