Charging money for tap water is ridiculous. 

Nickel-and-diming customers has been a business strategy with debatable effectiveness, depending on the business. If you go to a grocery store in NYC, there’s a good chance that you will be asked to pay for your grocery bags. It’s a way for the company to make a couple of extra cents off each customer, though some may claim it’s for the environment. If you tried that trick in other parts of the country, where customers can’t easily carry their groceries from the store to their home, you would never get away with it. Suburbanites could shop at another supermarket in their town that doesn’t charge 10 cents per grocery bag. If you live in a rural area with only one grocery store in town, they might be able to get away with nickel-and-diming customers, because they have no other choice but to shop there. 

Over time, society at large starts to accept that certain things will be exorbitantly priced. Ballpark hot dogs used to be around a dollar in the 80s; adjusted for inflation, they’d be $3, but we all know you’re not going to get one for $5 or less. No plain hot dog should be sold for $8, and yet they are, because of the greed of ballpark owners. The upcharge won’t go down unless fans collectively stop buying any overpriced concessions, which is basically impossible. 

While baseball fans might not stop buying $8 hot dogs, the customers at the cafe in this story aren’t going to stand for 75-cent tap water, as they shouldn’t!