More Goofy People

 One of the things that our governor shut down when the corona hit the fan was the can and bottle returns.  Of course they still charged us for the deposit when we bought the beer and pop, but the stores were no longer allowed to accept the returns and give us our deposit back.  We were assured that this was only going to be temporary, and it kinda was, but not exactly.  After about three months, it was announced that we could redeem our returnables, but only at stores that were properly set up for it.  The machines had to be in a separate room with two doors, one for entrance only and one for exit only, and only two customers were allowed to be in that room at once.  Walmart was the only store in town that had a set up like that.  They didn't set it up for COVID, it was already like that, been that way for decades.  So now all the returnables had to go to Walmart, including the ones we'd been saving for three months.  I had six 30 packs of beer cans, plus a couple dozen two liter pop bottles.  Not wanting to spend the better part of the day feeding cans into a machine one by one, and not wanting to make others wait while I did it, I decided to bring two cases of cans back every time I bought one new case of beer, which would catch me up eventually.  

Other people (we won't mention their names, they know who they are) chose to bring back all their cans and bottles at once.  Not only that, they must have thrown their returnables into the same bags as their regular trash and then brought it all to Walmart to sort it out while the rest of us waited outside.  There was one lady who had a lot of crushed cans mixed in with her good cans and her regular garbage.  Sometimes the machines will accept crushed cans if they can read the scanner code.  If not, then they kick them right back at you.  Each time one of her crushed cans was rejected, she tried it again three or four times before relegating it to the trash.  She also had some cans that looked good but the machine rejected them as well.  I heard her tell her friend that some of her party guests might have brought some cans from out of state, but she tried each one of those cans three or four times as well.  

I spent a good hour waiting in the returnables line, then ten minutes to walk halfway across the store to buy my one case of beer, then another half hour or so waiting in the checkout line because they were only operating three of their dozen lines on a busy Friday afternoon.  I have heard people say some bad things about Walmart you know, but I have concluded that there's nothing wrong with Walmart, it's the people in it.