Loading the beer truck

Gotta love Wednesdays.

Wednesday is the day the beer truck comes to pick up.

We do the bottle return for our area - people bring us their stinky dirty beer & liquor bottles & cans all week.

We deal with their stinky dirty beer & liquor bottles & cans & - eventually - give them their money for them.

You would think that part would be relatively easy. 10 cents a bottle/can - unless it's bigger than 750ml in which case it's 20 cents.

It is not as easy as you would think.

People are stOOpid. Not all of them. But enough. More than enough.

Yesterday, one regular customer brought a bag of cans back.

Hand poised over cash register, I asked him how many cans were in the bag.

"All of them"

 Uh huh. Thanks buddy.... took several tries before I was able to make him understand the question. He was not being deliberately dense. He just was.

I don't know how Suey puts up with them all. She is there a lot more than I am - and she deals with the maroons with a lot more good humour and grace than I am capable of.

I get pissy when they can't be bothered to sort their own stuff into cases. BEER CASES - or knockdowns, which are substitute cases that we provide. We do not want their recycle bins full of beer bottles. We do not want their bags of mixed crap - cans and bottles all in the same bag.

And here's a thought - if you ARE going to throw all the cans and bottles into shopping bags to bring them in for deposit - how 'bout you  EMPTY the damn things first?

Anyway, to me, the concept of putting the bottles back into the cases they originally came out of doesn't seem that difficult. But apparently it is.   The concept of needing to know how many cans or bottles you have so that you can be paid for them doesn't seem that hard either. But apparently it is.

And do NOT get me started on Corona's with limes stuffed in them. &%%# fruit flies!

So anyway - on Wednesday, the beer truck comes.

Used to be, we had a roller that we would put from the window to the truck and every one of the cases had to be pushed UP the roller to the truck. That was NOT FUN. I did develop arm muscles back when I used to do it though.

These days, all the trucks have lift gates, so the cases are put on pallets, wrapped, and then loaded onto the truck. Much easier - at least for us. We only have to bring everything up into the store - once it's that far, they do the rest.

Ross does as much of that as he can on Tuesday nights ...so on Wednesdays, Suey and I don't have as much to move. We often have way more cases than the store can hold though, so we do still have to do some.

That big green box is a can bin - this week, there were 18 bags holding 192 cans each.

Some weeks we have more than they can fit in here. People in Victoria Harbour go through a lot of beer!

Doesn't it all look like fun?