VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: Pedestrian Bridge Peddlers Refill Water Bottles

A unexampled ordinance that outlaws stopping on the Las Vegas Strip’s prosy bridges has squeeze into the spot the people who were already doing business organisation on that point illegally. Indeed, the role that a brigade of unlicensed bottled H2O peddlers played in triggering this ordinance is in all likelihood non insignificant, as Casino.org’s Vital Vegas blogger Walter Scott Roeben recently argued.

These vendors sell water, for anyplace from $1-$5 per bottle, during the summer months to visitors who didn’t architectural plan decent because, hey, they’re on vacation.

But are these vendors doing something worse? According to a unrelenting hearsay propagate by tourist websites, they routinely collect discharge bottles from junk cans and refill them with spigot water, then superglue the tops support on so the bottles seem new.

Myth Interpreted

The earliest variant of this warning we could regain came from a legitimate source. In 2010, later(a) Las Vegas law sergeant Mike John Ford told KLAS-TV/Las Vegas that unhoused people testament “take water bottles come out of the trash can, take them up with irrigate from an unknown region germ — could be a tap, could be anyplace — so pose them inward a cooler and sell them for $2.

Tourists experience no more idea where the bottles came from, and when they undetermined them, somebody has already drank from them before.”

The supergluing component to the highest degree likely came from a 2012 Tripadvisor warning, inwards which a user from Roanoke, Va. posted: “I actually heard it from 2 people, the for the first time being the Elvis impersonator on the Show Bus of the Stars circuit … Elvis said they use up empty-bellied bottles from junk cans and fill up them upwards with tap water, supergluing the tops so you conceive you are getting a new bottle.”

This Las Vegas irrigate peddler has opted for the convenience of an oversized tank with wheels — otherwise known as a garbage bin. (Image: city-data.com)

Doesn’t Hold Water

Sorry, Elvis, but the closest Walmart to the Strip currently sells a 35-pack of 16.9-ounce bottles of Pure Life purified water for $7, including tax.

That’s an outlay of 20 cents per bottle.

What’s more likely — that someone spent hours reuse bin-diving to cod perfectly uncrushed empty bottles of water from only when a single brand, on with caps that are color-matched, and then refilled to each one bottle, or that they’re OK with sacrificing 20 cents profit per feeding bottle to porcine $28-$168 for every $7 they expend at Walmart?

While on that point is no more vouching for the satinpod of people who select to happy chance the natural law to garner an income, we’ve ne'er heard of a single vendor existence caught doing this. Ever. And that’s probably because doing so would live a preposterous rot of their time.

More importantly, they couldn’t make out it. Water bottles all feature article either factory-wrapped sports tops or caps that bring forth a series of clicks when unscrewed for the world-class time. Superglued caps wouldn’t procreate those clicks, and would go away a telltale odor behind.

Water Over the Bridge

While what Las Vegas water vendors get along is illegal, they’re non begging you for money. They’re non harassing you for a larger confidential information after posing with you in their dress up for a selfie. And they’re not scamming you with a confidence gritty similar three-card monte.

They’re providing a serving — I that has belike already saved many lives. As concluded by a 2002 contemplate published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, dehydration increases the lay on the line of bosom assault inward any precondition moment by 46% inwards men and 59% in women.

And, illegal vendors wouldn’t follow lawlessly peddling if Mark Clark County, the Strip’s governing body, provided to a greater extent opportunities along the Strip for dehydrated tourists to hydrate inwards legal, affordable, and healthful ways.

And sorry, we don’t consider $7 holiday resort gift store H2O to follow affordable, nor H2O fountains that people shove parts of into their mouths to live sanitary.

The next clip you finger parched piece walking the Strip inwards 115-degree passion — especially after you’ve had a twosome of drinks of a more strong and dehydrating change — and so kibosh to purchase a stale bottle from an unlicensed stranger. That seems a lot less risky to us than walking a Roman mile and a half farther inwards your condition.

That is, unless all those strangers hold been hauled off to jailhouse past the time you get under one's skin here.

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