Absolutely! I get it if you're stocking up for weather disasters to a degree, but the number of folks who rely strictly on bottled water is too high. Seems that some combination of advertising + fear and convenience have made it too enticing to use single-use water bottles, though. ☹️
I prefer just getting a 1 gallon jug. Much less plastic and should do fine in those "just in case" times. Multiple plastic bottles is going to have a much higher concentration of leached chemicals. Although water is generally not much of a concern in this part of the northwest so just keeping a little bit is generally fine.
The people I see are generally buying a couple cases are definitely doing it for personal use. They usually have their kids with them so it's likely not for a business.
Plastic water bottles are the number one litter that I find when picking up garbage in the neighborhood. I also see many crushed pretty small vertically which sends odd to me. Why crush it if you are going to toss it? And why crush it the more difficult way? Is it possibly a drug use thing?
Again, that is not really an issue here in Washington.
Filtered pitchers are not very expensive. Even buying actual brand named Brita filters at $15 per filter yields you 120 gallons of filtered water. That's 12.5¢/gallon. Costco water here is $7.80 for 40 half liter bottles or 39¢/liter. Normalizing that is $1.47/gallon. Costco bottled water is significantly more expensive.