Selfsufficientish.com

This is brilliant - I hope other companies catch on quickly. As a child I used to go round the park with friends, collecting up the empty bottles and taking them to the shop to get the deposit back :)


Soft Drinks Company Running on Empties
In the days before plastic bottles and canned fizzy drinks, glass bottles dominated the soft drinks industry - and armies of little boys and girls earned a modest income by returning the empty bottles to retailers and getting a refund. These days, supermarkets don't want to know about glass bottles for soft drinks, but Scottish company AG Barr, the makers of beverages such as Irn-Bru (which challenges the dominance of Coca Cola in the Scottish market place) still produces 30 million bottles each year, mainly for small corner shops. The bottles can be returned for a 20p refund
- which is then often spent in the shop, which small retailers like. Now AG Barr is to launch a new advertising campaign with the slogan "Scotland raise your glass" to persuade customers to buy the product in its traditional form. The recent hot weather has helped sales of bottles as drinks stay cooler longer in a glass bottle - and purists claim it tastes better too!

Strange - another one of those weird British customs . Boys and girls earning money by returning bottles? Most bottles in Germany were (and I believe still are) returnable for a deposit. Even the large plastic Coke bottles have a deposit on them (Coca Cola was only allowed to introduce them in Germany on condition they charge a deposit and recycle them properly).

However, us Germans are too bloody stingy to let kids have the money for them - we just take them back with our next shopping and spend the money ourselves!

Btw, if I remember correctly, there was a small deposit on cans in Australia - hey Aussies, can somebody help me out here? I remember kids walking round with large bags, collecting beer cans during a cricket match.

Shirlz2005 wrote:

As a child I used to go round the park with friends, collecting up the empty bottles and taking them to the shop to get the deposit back :)

yep, made a fortune this way myself. Corona soft drinks.
I also ran a profitable business fetching cigs for all the stressed out young Mums in the neighbourhood. Then the '80s came and spoiled it.

I used to fetch my older brother's cigs, if I resisited long enough I got 10p of the change to spend on sweets. In the days of 2 fruit salads for a penny, 10p went a long way.

Happy to say, that now, he's given up the cigs & I've largely given up the sweets

We used to take the pop bottles back & the deposit was spent on the next bottle.

You're a youngster Ranter - I remember 8 fruit salads or black jacks for a penny!! And I used to go and get my parent's cigarettes when I was about 11 and the shop didn't bat an eyelid selling them to me.

Don't remember deposits on drinks bottles though!

Hi,
I like the current advertising billboards for irnbru and the other barrs soft drinks that they do, there is one of 3 workie's sat down, one of which has daubs of red paint on him as he has just finished painting the forth road bridge and he is havng a big drink (which non scots might not know needs continuously painted, once you've got to the end, the other end will have started to corrode), so an ongoing task. Near my office today I saw some 'workies' and one was swigging from a bottle of irnbru, sorry to be so coarse but I thought he looked sexy... how bizarre ....the power of marketing,]