[jorleif]

It may come as a surprise to people who read lots of startup news, because you tend to only hear about the successes, but generally it is not very easy to disrupt any business, or even become a millionaire. Achieving those for e.g. laundry might not make the world a much better place, but it is still quite an achievement.

The other side of this "wholly unnecessary"-business, is that with rising standards of living, necessities are already fairly well provided for, so it is quite obvious that any future desired consumer good will be mostly in the unnecessary category. A funny read about these types of things is "The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation" by Christopher J. Berry, where he describes 18th century philosophers discussing what is luxury (i.e unnecessary) and what is necessity. They end up with a paradoxical example regardning the scant clothing of "savages" (that is non-europeans in warmer climates), and cannot resolve the fact that despite this clothing being really primitive by their standards, it is not strictly necessary for survival, or even most other activities, so they must conclude that even that is just luxury.

[IgorPartola]

But this stuff applies only in the narrow echo chamber of SF, LA, NYC, etc. Fresh water is a necessity, and more people don't have that than will ever be a customer of Washio. I am all for people innovating anything and everything, but let's put things into perps practice: this particular service provides a luxury version of an already luxury service for the richest parts of the world.