Die Deutschen und ihre Pfandflaschen - eine US Perspektive

From the comments, the culture that is German

by Tyler Cowen on July 27, 2016 at 12:19 am in Current Affairs, Economics, Uncategorized | Permalink

In Germany, where I live, you get money back for plastic bottles (“Pfand”). Sometimes €0.25 per bottle. And yet, I collect them, without ever finding the time to cash them. I never outright throw them away, but leave them standing neatly close to public trash cans. They are gone in less than an hour.

German colleagues are horrified by my barbaric behavior. I tell them that someone will recycle them, and get the money. But they are actually are horrified that I am not willing to claim the money as everyone else does. I can explain that I would be working below minimum wage if I were to spend time and mental bandwidth returning bottles. But these reasons are no use against the dogma that pfand bottles should be returned. Man macht das nicht.

2David Hoffman July 27, 2016 at 12:33 am

One night I was drinking in a bar in Hamburg that sat only about 12 people. There were about four patrons there (including me) and we were all talking together. I had left my change from a 20 Euro and my jacket on the back of a chair at the other end of the bar. These Germans were absolutely driven to distraction by the fact that I left my money and jacket down there. I could see everybody, everybody was getting along famously, yet they kept telling me that I left my money on the bar. All I could do is ask “Who is going to steal it, you?”

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