Quoted from Zablon:I looked into it after I posted this, and yeah apparently due to 1. plastic shortage 2. Manufacturing shortage (worker shortage) and it is used in many medical areas which has skyrocketed in the last few years of course.
It seems you can make it yourself from your tap water without too much problem though.
I worked in a quality control position in a spring water plant in college one summer. Distilled water is a whole pain in the ass process to run, because it is a completely separate product. Spring water brands can be changed over in about 10 minutes, but its a several hour process to change over to produce/bottle distilled water. It may be that demand is so high on the regular spring water and drinking water products (not the same!!) that the low volume products like distilled and fluoride water are not getting run as often. I don't buy the plastic shortage idea...most water bottling companies produce their gallon containers on site, on demand. PET bottles (.5l water bottles) were produced in Canada and trucked in stacked on pallets. Those nasty things would show up with dead bugs in them and all kinds of nasty stuff.
Also, those 5 gallon returnable bottles...don't drink out of them. We employed people to manually smell test each returned bottle for algae because the machines couldn't do it reliably. They would come back with piss in them, dead mice, used Band-Aids stuck inside, condoms, you name it. There was no way that cleaning process could catch every nasty bottle the minimum wage sniff testers/line loaders missed. I remember a 5gal fluoride (baby water) came back once rejected and unopened with a used Band-Aid stuck to the inside surface at the top 1/3 of the jug.
I also got a kick out of stopping the line for 5 minutes to change the cap and label for 1gal spring water from our brand that was about $.25/gal at the time to the "Green Park" brand which was sold in hipster stores in the DC area for $3/gal. Learned a lot about the world that summer!
