A question for any B.C. Dopers of a legal bent. The L.D.B. near my house recently enacted a limit on the number of empty beer bottles a customer can return in one day (2 dozen). There is no limit set on the number of beer you can pay deposit on however. I am wondering if they have a legal obligation to accept those bottles they originally charged deposit on, or if not, why not. Some of my friends are prodigious drinkers, and should I host a beer bash for them I don’t want to be returning empties for the next two weeks. I am considering some civil disobedience, so the Straight Dope would be appreciated.
Is that the Middlegate store? Since they were displaced from their original location (demolished for condos), they don’t have much room and put on the limit. Do other LDB stores have a limit?
I don’t know the legal situation here - some supermarkets have had limits on pop bottles for years.
All BCLDB stores have a 24-container limit on returns – if you have more bottles to return, you have to take them to a recycling depot and accept less than the full deposit.
If you don’t remember to take your empties back every time you hit the store, your kitchen ends up looking slummy, like mine. :mad:
I can’t speak with authority to B.C., but is it possible that the limit’s there just as a CYA, i.e., they’ll probably take more than 24, but if you’re a jerk or are really abusive (240!), they don’t have to serve you?
Also, do you actually have to make a purchase to get your deposit back?
In Michigan we have a state-wide deposit for a lot of containers. You can take 'em back anywhere that sells the brand. By law, the store must accept up to $25 worth of returns, but no more. And no, you don’t have to make a purchase. It was my sole source of income as a child when the law first went into effect!
Lots of places here though violate the law – they’ll post signs to the effect that they won’t accept more than $5 in returns. I think that by my count, the Seven-11 down the road has probably lost about $2400 in sales for just beer and coffee alone in the last two years, for refusing to take my 24 cans when they insisted they were out of space!
Please, please, talk me down from my ledge. We pay the deposit, but we have to accept less than we pay when we return the bottles/cans!!! I’m headed for a high tower with a rifle and scope here… how is this fair? How can they charge me $3.60 one day for deposit and then offer only $2.40 return the next day. Am I taking crazy pills here?!?
Just to resurrect this with an answer from an LDB employee: BC liquor stores have generally accepted more-or-less unlimited returns, except for a few small stores. (The Middlegate location I mentioned above is in temporary quarters, so they cut the return limit earlier.) All those other stores recently cut their limit because of the beer strike. Two (I think) large local breweries were out, so the stores couldn’t get rid of their empties. Then when the strike was settled, pickups were behind and customers had accumulated lots of empties, which would have overloaded the stores even more.
I haven’t been anywhere but Middlegate, so I don’t know if things are back to normal yet.