The bottle return system in germany is very difficult...

Dear Sir,

you are experiencing a major clusterfuck, proudly brought to you and us by incompetent and unwilling dealerships, and market chains in association with the drink producers.

You know, these people had an early warning, in fact 13 years of warning. If they won't reduce the amount of non-returnable bottels, they would have to face a law, forcing them to accept them as returns. When they finally had to face the music, they tried everything to dodge the law. One major strategy included and still includes to annoy the customers to no end, in the hope that the people would vent their anger at the politicians and forcing the politicians to revert the law. Because of this strategy, and unbelievable incompetence of the managers in the industry (I will come back to this in a second), you still can't return these bottles wherever you like.

Regarding the incompetent managers, can you believe that they didn't manage to build up a working return system? You know, we in fact have a working system for decades, which is for re-usable bottles. But theses heros of the industry didn't manage to utilize the same system for non-reusable bottles. They didn't manage to clone it. In fact, when they got a grace period, because they claimed they wanted to set up a nation-wide return system, they had to declare defeat in the end. They said they couldn't organize and manage such a system, because it was to complex. Please note we talk about top CEOs, with insane salaries. German CEOs, who have a reputation of running everything in a well ordered and optimized way didn't manage to organize the collecton of empty bottles. How ironic. Problably they can't even organize a child birthday party.

But the strategy didn't work. The law didn't go away. It was even enhanced a little bit to force the dealers and market chains to behave slightly better. However, they follow it to the smalles extend possible. And that is that they have to accept exactly(!) identical bottles of the one they sell. So every chain simply uses a slightly different bottle. Especially the large chains just use bottles with their own logo, formally making these bottles different from other bottles.

If you feel fucked, yes, you are. We all are. I suggest you politley explain your anger to your dealer. In the hope that at some point enough of the dealers complain to their market chains and light a fire under the butts of these idiotic managers.

I am sorry that I have no better news for you.