Horse 1119 - Happiness is No Frills Orange

Something to drink is all I ask for. It's not a very difficult request, or is it?

Perhaps you'd like to try a simple experiment. Just go to your local supermarket and see if you can buy a single serve drink, that isn't either an energy drink or a +500mL bottle.
This leads me to an interesting question: Are our lives really that tiring that we either need to be wired up on caffeine or sugar? Why do we need so much liquid that we're forced to wee half an hour later? This is related to but not quite the same as the great Starbucks question of "why do we actually need a whole pint of scalding, flavoured liquid?"

375mL cans used to be easy to find on supermarket shelves. Granted, they still are there but now they only come in boxes of 10, 12, 18, 24, 30! When will the madness stop? Likewise if you do happen to find a can of drink in the supermarket, it's likely to be an "energy drink" of some sort (either V, Red Bull or Mother) and worse, the 250mL cans are disappearing and were starting to see 500mL cans appear in their place.

All of this makes me think two things which are complementary to each other.
Firstly, caffeine itself is a diuretic which means that it actually forces the production of urine. This means that a while after you've drunk something, that you'll have to take a wee somewhere, and thus require another drink sooner. Quite deliberately, this begins a faster wee-drink-wee-drink cycle, which results in higher profits for the drink manufacturers.
Secondly because is a psychoactive stimulant drug, it's also mildly addictive. The British Journal of Addiction concluded that caffeinism (if that's a word) affects 1 in 10 people but probably is only diagnosed in about 1 in 10,000.
These two things taken together mean that you have a product which is both addictive and forces self-promotion.

Going back to my original tag line that "Happiness is No Frills Orange", No Frills Orange drink from Franklins contains zero caffeine and therefore doesn't produce the negative effects mentioned above and because it's only 375mL, it won't force you to wee half an hour later. The other benefit is that it only costs 49 cents, which means that you can get five or six of them for the same price as Energy Wee-A-Lot drinks.