Office Bottle Delivery in Five Minutes: The Plain-English Setup

Not every post on this blog needs a jug-based joke. This one is for the person who got handed the task of "sorting out the water" for the office and wants the short version. Good news: it is short. Here is exactly how it works.

Step one: know what you are ordering

The bottles are the classic 5-gallon size, the kind that sits upside down on top of a stand in plenty of break rooms. Each bottle is $13.00. That is the whole price of the water, with no mystery line items hiding behind it.

Step two: know the two rules

There are two other numbers worth remembering. Delivery is $5.00 per order, and the minimum order is three bottles. The delivery fee is per order, not per bottle, which means a bigger order spreads that charge across more water.

Step three: do the quick math

Here is the arithmetic, so nobody has to open a calculator in the middle of a meeting.

Three bottles, the minimum, comes to $39.00 for the water plus $5.00 for delivery, for a total of $44.00.

Six bottles comes to $78.00 for the water plus the same $5.00 for delivery, for a total of $83.00.

Ten bottles comes to $130.00 for the water plus $5.00 for delivery, for a total of $135.00.

The pattern is simple. Multiply the number of bottles by thirteen, then add five.

Step four: pick a quantity that matches your office

Picking a number is mostly a matter of looking at how the break room behaves. A small team that mostly fills reusable bottles might go through a few at a time. A busier floor with a steady stream of visitors will want more on hand. If you are not sure, the three-bottle minimum is a perfectly reasonable place to start, and you can look at how fast they disappear before choosing a bigger number.

Step five: place the order

The ordering page lives at /order/. It takes a few minutes. You tell us what you need and we take it from there. If you want to read about how we work with workplaces in more detail first, our office water delivery page covers it.

What the order is not

It is not a complicated procurement project. There is no committee, no seventeen-tab spreadsheet and no meeting to schedule a meeting. It is a quantity, an address and a delivery fee, and the whole thing fits comfortably inside a coffee break. If your office has ever spent a week debating a stapler purchase, this will feel refreshingly quick.

A small tip for whoever owns the task

Put a reminder on your calendar to glance at the break room supply once in a while, especially before a busy week. It is a thirty-second check, and it saves you from the classic scenario in which the last bottle runs out right before a client visit and everyone suddenly becomes very interested in who is responsible.

If you are the person who got handed the task, take heart. It is one of the easier items on the to-do list, and the person who handles it quietly becomes a hero to everybody who just wants a cold cup of water on a Tuesday.

Ready when you are: place your first order.