Sodastream Is A Ripoff 2022-05-17
So, if you haven't heard of Sodastream, I don't know where you have been living the last few years. Certainly not in a millennial saturated western society. Anyways, Sodastream is basically a small scale water carbonation system intended for residential use. The idea being that you can carbonate water at home and if you don't like plain carbinated water you can add various Sodastream branded flavour crap to it. I mean, do people really drink just plain carbonated water with absolutely nothing in it? What kind of monster would do that? The general idea makes it sound like if you are willing to do the "work" of carbonating your own water then you can have custom made cola [or fruity juice] for cheaper than if you bought it at a retail store. But do not be fooled in to thinking it is going to make your cola habit any cheaper.
Sodarip!Example 1: Sodastream Flavours
You can buy Sodastream flavours pretty cheap at walfart.ca for example. In fact, as I type this they appear to be on sale: two for $10. So let's do the math. A single bottle costs $5, and it says right on the bottle that it makes 9L of soda. 9L [also known as 9000ml] is the equivalent of 25.35 cans [which are 355ml each]. If I could really get 25 cans of soda for $5 plus carbonation it might be worth it, but I have been mixing ~500ml drinks at the "first line" on the fill measuring cup and they still taste pretty weak. I am barely getting 6L per bottle, which is about 17 cans... and once I add in the cost of carbonation it is more expensive than just buying cans.
Example 2: Flavours From Someone Else
There are other companies offering soda syrup, but they're all second-knuckle-deep in covidgouging. There's sodasyrup.ca and sodacentre.com but they are both much more expensive. I even saw trevibeverages.com which is so far down the gouging rabbithole that they don't even put prices on their web site. I assume so that they can fluctuate prices more frequently than gasoline. Anyways, take sodasyrup.ca for example. Their largest Dr. Pepper syrup container is 12L and mixes at a 5:1 ratio. That means 12L of syrup and 60L of water, for a total of 72L of soda. That is 202 can-sized drinks, and they sell it for $82.99. That's 41.08¢ per 355ml can-sized drink which is barely cheaper than the 43.62¢ it costs to just buy cans from Walmart at their recently inflated price of $10.47 per case. Throw in carbonation and the economy of it drops way off.
Example 3: Alternative Carbonation
It is also possible to buy cheaper carbonation. You see, Sodastream really wants you to use their proprietary CO2 canisters, but there are [sort of] ways around that. You can get cheaper refills at various places, including even Crappy Tire now. You can get a fancy adapter that lets you convert the Sodastream connector to something that fits a much larger tank. Or you can even do what I did... Buy a larger tank at a local homebrew place and some fittings so that you can use any PET bottle [no Sodastream machine required]. My carbonation method requires that I fill a bottle [that I already paid for and drank the soda out of] mostly to the top with water, cap it with a fancy connector, hook it up to my bigass tank, shake it vigorously for maybe 20 seconds or so, then measure out and pour in the syrup. I'm not thrilled that it is costing me a few cents more per drink to do that.
Epilogue
What I really need is a supply of MUCH cheaper syrup... perhaps from a restaurant supply place. I don't have a problem buying a full jug of syrup, I just don't want to be paying more to hump my own carbonated water than to just let Pepsi Corporation do it for me. :-(