Water is the thing a visitor buys most often and thinks about least, and in Craiova the price of it moves by more than four times depending on where you are standing. Three bottles bought in one day in September 2026, from till receipts rather than shelf-gazing: 2.33 lei a litre in a neighbourhood shop, 6.78 in Lidl, 10.00 in a bakery by the road. Nothing about the water changes. What changes is the size of the bottle and the kind of shop you are in when you get thirsty.
Prices, 8 September 2026: 1.5 L Devin 3.50 lei at a neighbourhood shop; 0.5 L Dorna 3.39 at Lidl; 0.5 L plain water 5.00 at a bakery. Plus 0.50 SGR deposit per container, refundable. Written down with its date rather than kept up to date.
A 1.5 litre bottle of Devin at a neighbourhood grocery on Strada Toamnei, 3.50 lei — 2.33 a litre. A half-litre Dorna at the Lidl on Nicolae Romanescu, 3.39 — 6.78 a litre. A half-litre of plain water at a bakery on Strada Râului, 5.00 — 10.00 a litre, four and a third times the first. Same city, same Tuesday.
Half-litre bottles are the expensive habit wherever they are bought — you are paying for the convenience of being thirsty in the wrong place. The single change worth making is to buy 1.5 litre bottles from an ordinary neighbourhood shop and carry one, rather than buying halves where you happen to be. Larger formats, 5 litres and up, usually fall below 2 lei a litre again, though we have not yet bought one here to prove it.
A small neighbourhood grocery on Strada Toamnei, open from 07:00 on weekdays and 08:00 on Sunday. There is another shop immediately adjacent and it is not the same one. Go by the pin below rather than by the doorway or the number on the wall.
Romania runs a deposit-return scheme, the SGR. Every plastic bottle, can and glass bottle carries 0.50 lei on top of the shelf price, and you get it back — at the machines in the supermarkets and at many ordinary shops, against a slip you spend or cash. It is only a cost if you throw the container away. Ten containers taken back in Craiova returned 5.00 lei, which is a coffee at the Işalnița shop and a bit over. Buying water daily for a month, that is somewhere around 15 to 45 lei sitting in your recycling bin depending on the size you buy — and the smaller the bottle, the more deposits you are holding for the same water.
The obvious question, since you see people collecting: at 0.50 lei a container it takes about 5,400 returned containers a month to reach the Romanian minimum wage of 2,699 lei net. That is 180 a day, every day, or 22 an hour across an eight-hour day — one container found, carried and fed into a machine every two and a half minutes, without a day off. An hour of minimum-wage work is worth about 32 containers. Collecting is worth doing with the bottles you already have, and it is genuinely worth something to someone with time and no work; it is not an income you could choose.
Three purchases on one day, not a survey. The 3.50 may have been a promotion rather than the shelf price — it has not been checked on a second visit. More shops will be added as receipts come in, and if the cheap one turns out to be dearer next time, this entry will say so rather than quietly change.
Strada Toamnei, Craiova