Is returning your bottles really worth the hassle? Short answer – yes, it’s totally worth it. Long answer – it’s only worth it if you have a place to store your bottles for about 6 months and own a car.
You see, when I was living in Vancouver, I never returned any of my bottles. I didn’t have a car for two of those years, I never had any space inside any of my tiny apartment suites to store them, and it always seemed like a huge hassle. My weekends and weekday nights were precious to me, and the last thing I wanted to spend a few hours doing was organizing all of my liquor bottles and returning them to some depot.
What I did instead, and it’s something a lot of other Vancouverites do by the way, is I would leave all my bottles outside near the giant recycling bin and they would magically disappear the next day. Well, maybe not magically, but it was a lot easier to leave them out to be collected by someone else than to return them for a few bucks myself.
This isn’t an option in Toronto. Maybe it was just a Vancouver thing, but here no one just leaves there bottles outside for anyone to come and take. So, we were forced to hold onto all of our bottles, store them out on our balcony, and return them ourselves. We thought we’d do this every few months, but to be honest we started collecting them in September and didn’t get around to returning them until this past weekend. 8 months of bottles is a lot of bottles people!
Since I’m still in full-on spring cleaning more, we finally got around to transporting every last bottle to The Beer Store, and we ended getting $20 back! Considering most bottles (or cans) only give you 10 cents back, that just goes to show how many bottles we were hoarding all winter.
What did we end up doing with that $20 you ask? Instead of blowing it on $20 worth of Cinnabon like my HB wanted to, we used it to buy a shoe rack and a few other household items we desperately needed. Not exactly exciting, but if we hadn’t saved all those bottles, that money would’ve come out of our own pockets.
And yes, we could have saved way more than $20 if we just drank less wine and beer, but if you’ve ever experienced a winter in Toronto, you’ll understand how that’s just not an option.
Do you return all of your bottles? How much is the most you’ve ever gotten back?
