Desperation

In the State of Oregon, when you buy a soda or bottled water or Gatorade or some other drink in a returnable container the vendor charges you a 10 cent per container deposit at the purchase point.

When you take them to the bottle return, you get that dime back.

For a few weeks (a shorter time when we have a houseful of people) we toss our returnables into a green bag that's hanging in the laundry room.
Every once in awhile, we scan our little keychain barcode at the grocery store kiosk and get a little printed ticket that takes 20 bucks or so off our grocery bill.

It feels like savings, although of course it's not.

We paid that money out, it's just being returned.
When we moved to Oregon in 1989, the bag boy (yes, it was always a boy) in every grocery store we patronized had to personally count them. We'd go to the back of the store, usually a dimly lit and stinky area that felt like a stop in another dimension and press the customer service button.

(And why do they call it customer 'service' anyway? Asking for a friend...)

Eventually a kid would show up to count the cans.
One.
At.
A.
Time.

He usually wore latex gloves, but sometimes did it bare-handed. A really shitty job to have to do. Then he grabbed a pen with his sticky fingers and wrote a little ticket to take to the checkout. Fun times. And all we got was a nickel for each one back then, didn't go to 10 cents until 2017.

Next technological leap was a kiosk outside the stores. It was filled with constantly jammed machines and was another big pain in the ass.The kiosks were a stinky, cramped and crowded mess shoved off in some forgotten corner outdoors or in an open-to-the-outside alcove on the exterior of the store. When we had cans to bring back, we'd usually have to wait for someone to finish counting their cans so we could have a  machine to feed them into.

If it was winter, we'd have to stand in the wind and rain.
In summer, there were hornets buzzing around. All that sugar everywhere, I guess.

The machines were constantly jamming or full and unable to accept more cans/bottles.

Then you had to push a button. Over the store's PA system you'd hear, "Customer service at the bottle return." Sometimes that button would be pushed multiple times and NO ONE CAME to help.

It was frustrating and we finally got tired of the bullshit and started tossing our returnable cans and bottles into our bin at curbside.

Most weeks a little old man came and went through our recycling bin about 5 AM on Friday mornings and took them all. We figured that at least the stuff was getting recycled and that we were doing the guy a favor.

Going through the inconvenience of trying to return them just got to be too much.Not sure when, probably in the early 90s, the state 'improved' things by opening bottle return places.
Bottle Drop they call it.A roll of 10 Green Bags costs $2.00.
Then they charge 40 cents for every bag you drop off to be counted.

When we go in to get bags, they print stickers for us, too. Then when we take them back, they go into a little door on the side of the building and someone there scans the tag, runs the items through a machine to be counted and the money just shows up in our account. We scan our keyfob at the store and get a little paper ticket with a dollar amount. Present it when we check out and just like that, a big 20 or 30 dollars off the bill.

Since the plague hit, the lines at the place are all the way along the edges of the parking lot. There's no place to park. It's like an anthill.
They're practicing social distancing, but from the time it opens in the morning until it closes at night, there are people in line. Every time I've driven by since mid-March, the line is alllll the way around the parking lot and down the little drive into the industrial area that's behind the little plaza. There are at least 40 people in line at all times of the day.

So there are people asking on Facebook for anyone who is willing to donate their cans. People are willing to go stand in line for two hours in the heat to get their ten or twenty bucks.

Once in awhile someone offers some cans and bottles and there are 10 to 15 people wanting to come get them almost immediately.

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And our "representatives" can't decide how much money to give to corporations and their big campaign donors.

When this all started, they added a bit to people's unemployment benefits, which kept the economy going a little.

Not everyone got the extra. Some didn't get any help at all.
Which has led to people lining up to get a little bit of cash at the bottle return.

It's awful.

Think about how much worse it would be if they didn't even have that.

I'm scared for the direction this country is headed.

The moratorium on evictions is about to expire.
People have no money.
Many are hungry.

And the people who are supposed to be representing all of us are wrangling over stupid shit. I noticed that they managed to agree not to shut government down... meaning that they get to keep their gold-plated benefits and big salaries, and of course keep all the money given to them by their corporate bosses.

I'm starting to get more than a little angry.

I can't see that voting for one candidate over another is going to do a fucking thing, either. Since it IS both sides fucking off and doing nothing to help.