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Who went around collecting cans as a kid?

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as a kid?

I'm in my 30's, upper middle class, decent home in a nice suburb.... and I STILL collect cans and return them for deposit.
 
as a kid?

I'm in my 30's, upper middle class, decent home in a nice suburb.... and I STILL collect cans and return them for deposit.

And that, my thrifty friend, is how you got to be upper middle class and afford a decent home in a nice suburb! Excellent.
 
I never collected cans, but one of my earliest memories is my grandmother taking their recycling to ShopRite in Newburgh, NY and getting money for them. I always thought that was neat growing up in NJ where we didnt have it.

I used to trash pick electronics like VCRs and TVs, stereos and speakers, etc and fix them if I could. Also, lawn equipment was a fav. I'd use that stuff to mow anyones grass in the neighborhood I could.
 
Cans have their current shape to make them easier to hold.

The old cans were just as easy to hold but could not be considered stable with the new thinner metal. The design was changed to use less metal. Look at the bottoms of the new cans vs the old , 1980's, and the indented shape that has nothing to do with holding the can. The old cans were much harder to crush vertically. The new ones I can crush easily.

Also, the deposit is all taxes. It has nothing to do with the cost of the material. A water bottle might be less than a 1 cent worth of plastic, but the deposit is 5 or 10 cents so people don't throw them in the garbage or litter.

Deposits like some states have today didn't exist. Glass bottles were worth 5-10 cents because the soda companies recycled them and you brought them back to the store to get your money back. Companies took them back, washed them, repainted them and sold them again. They were not broken down into new products like today. Cans were all about weight, the more metal the more the scrap dealer paid.
 
My grandmother collected them. She sometimes picked me up from school and after shopping would have me sit and do what she thought was fun, pasting stamps to make the books 🙁
Free labor for her was always fun. 😀

Mom redeemed them at the piggly wiggly. don't know if other places participated.
 
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