How much does a pop or beer bottle cost the bottling plant, and how much does it cost to transport it to the local store? Are aluminum cans noticeably cheaper. Mexican Coke is about twice the price of the regular stuff, am I paying the cost to transport it a long distance or is it just that people will pay more for it and would cost about the same if they had a bottling plant that used sugar the next town over? Would Mexican Coke be much cheaper in cans?
Perhaps you don’t realize this, but the price you pay for just about anything is based more on what people are willing to pay than what it costs to produce. This does result if few cases where people are not willing to pay the cost of production, but those that produce these items do not do that for very long.
Anything above the cost of production that someone is willing to pay is just pocketed by the producer, or some middleman along the way.
To answer your question, yes, I would suspect Mexican Coke to cost less in cans because my guess is that people would not be willing to pay as much for the product in a can. That is probably why it is not offered in a can. Why sell something for less when people will pay more?
Currently, glass bottles cost more than aluminum cans to the bottler, because of 2 factors: additional weight increases transportation costs, and more breakage (and tougher cleanup).
In the old days, this wasn’t true because the glass bottles were returned, washed, and refilled – they were reused many times. Back then, the vending machine where you got your (6-ounce) bottle of pop had a wooden case next to it where you put the empty bottle when you’d drunk it all. If you left with it, you saved the empty in the back seat of your car till you came back, or you put it in the similar rack of empties at some other pop machine. If you just left it laying somewhere, some kid would soon snatch it up – they were worth money. Any place where there was a pop machine would give you a full bottle for 3 or 4 empties. (Our far was 3 miles out of town, on a main highway. Right about where some people would toss their empty bottles into our ditch. I had to walk the ditch before each time we mowed the grass. But I got to keep the bottles I found, so it was one chore I liked.)
And any shop that had a pop machine looked for empties – they were expected to return them. When they bought 6 cases of pop from the bottler’s truck, they had to turn in 6 cases of empties. If they had less, they were charged an extra fee for each missing case of empties. (And were paid that same fee extra for any ‘surplus’ cases of empties.)
When I was a kid, back in the 50s, pop bottles all had a deposit paid on them. Most people took their own bottles back, as the deposit was not insignificant.
I remember going to the Farnborough Air show as a young teenager, where me and a couple of other lads spent a large part of the afternoon collecting bottles and claiming the deposits. I recollect that some people might not have actually abandoned them, or even finished the contents when we collected them.
Another ‘trick’, which I never did (honest guv) was to climb over the back gate at the pub and ‘collect’ some bottles that had already been returned.
I’m pretty sure that Mexican Coke is bottled in glass because they still recycle the glass bottles down there, unlike here in the US. So presumably there are savings from using glass bottles repeatedly that more than offset the higher shipping cost.
Here in the US, we don’t reuse the bottles, so the choice is either disposable glass, plastic or aluminum. And there are basically 2 costs that would come into play- the cost of the container and any caps/lids, and whatever additional weight is involved. And it appears that for containers 12 oz and under, aluminum cans are the winner, for >12 oz on up to 3 liters, plastic wins out.
As to why Coke imports Mexican Coke instead of just detailing each bottling plant to do a periodic run with cane sugar, I’d have to guess that they can mark the Mexican stuff up beyond what they can mark up garden-variety sugared US Coke for.
(note- around Easter/Passover you can often find Kosher-for-Passover Coke made with sugar rather than corn syrup, and bottled in the US. The 2 liter bottles have yellow caps.)
Bolding mine.
Do you mean recycle, as in grind up, melt down, and re-cast into fresh glass for a non-food use, or do you mean *re-use *as in wash and refill with more Coke?
I’m pretty sure bump means re-use. ISTR seeing cases of empties at grocery stores in Baja.
But the first reply hit it on the nose. Everything you buy is priced on supply and demand. Mexican Coke is going to be pricier than regular Coke so long as people think it is different and worth the extra cost.
Mexican beverages are mostly still packaged in returnable glass bottles. You pay the deposit on the bottle if you carry it away. The Mexican Coke bottles in US stores include that deposit on the bottle, which never gets returned. Plus the cost of importing and shipping – in south Texas, Mexican beer is quite a bit more expensive than Bud or Miller, even though a local beer is cheaper in Mexico than Bud is in Texas. So there is, for some reason, a pretty high cost involved in importing products from Mexico for resale in the US. In Mexico, it is cheaper to buy beer in returnable bottle, if you can find it in cans at all.
The HEB supermarket chain in south Texas markets several store-branded flavors of sodas including cola, in a cane-sugar version, in cans. They cost about 20% more than the regular store brand corn-syrup product, and the difference is probably mostly in the economy of scale – the syrup drinks outsell the cane-sugar drinks, so are cheaper.
There are about 33 grams of sugar per can of soda. That’s about 2.5 cents worth of sugar. Even if the HFCS was free (which is isn’t; it costs nearly the same as sugar these days), we are only talking a difference in cost of $0.15 a six-pack (and, as I said, the HFCS has to cost them something, so we are talking much less than 15 cents), yet you say they cost 20% more.
No, they cost 20% more because people will pay 20% more, plain and simple.
Bottled beverages in Mexico come in glass bottles, plastic bottles and aluminum cans. I would guess that plastic is becoming the most common.
I believe this is the case even now in some states. I believe it is $.05 a bottle.
You missed the part where I attributed the cost differential to economy of scale. Any specialty product, produced in smaller quantities for a more limited market, typically costs more per unit to produce, for that reason.
I guess I have heard this before but I am completely befuddled that deposits on beverage containers are not standard practice in some (most?) states. If I understand some posts correctly there used to be but are not now?
The idea that beverage containers would be thrown out rather than recycled or reused is just unbelievable to me. It is a tremendous waste, not to mention the litter factor. Even paper milk cartons have a deposit here.
Why on earth wouldn’t you have deposits and bottle depots?
Yeah, especially glass bottles. Why aren’t we reusing them? It seems like you could standardize all glass beer bottles, and just redistribute them to the breweries. That would have to be cheaper than re-making them, wouldn’t it?
FluffyBob do you save your paper milk cartons and redeem the deposit?
Here in California there is 5 cent deposit on most beverage containers. I think that there is some way I can save my bottles and cans and take them somewhere to get that 5 cents back. That is way way more trouble than it is worth. Taking the cans to the redemption center, waiting while they are counted to get maybe $30 every 3 months. I just put them into the recycling bin every other week.
I save up piles of empties in sacks on the back patio for the times when I’m broke. Which seems to happen every couple months. Then I take em in for usually about 30-40 bucks and can buy more beer with it. Which is usually enough to last me until next paycheck.
Mexican Coke bottles in the US are clearly marked “non-returnable”. Are these the exact same bottles that are returnable in Mexico, or are these special ones meant to be disposable for the US market?
Every now and then Minnesota proposes implementing a deposit. I’m glad they haven’t. We’ve progressed beyond having to haul every single container we use back to the store to recover our money, and can just throw them in our recycling bins.
Do any states actually have deposits that have kept up with inflation? Sometimes I see deposits for other states listed on a bottle, but they’re something worthless like a nickel.
Oh, we recycle. We just don’t get paid to do so.
I’ve read an article that said this is because of one of the most effective PR campaigns of all time.
Long story short: the bottling companies figured out it would save fuel and labor to not have to collect their empties, so they started backing anti-littering campaigns in the 70s in an effort to convince the public that the public, rather than the bottlers, should be responsible for disposing of (or recycling) waste bottles and cans.