It all started when the government started bottle deposit which is a good thing to have.

Think about it for one second. Would you prefer your currency in out of thin air printed digital digits or would you go with bottle deposit? It takes them nothing to create their digital fiat but for bottle deposit they have to make a bottle. Furthermore you can store liquid in the bottle and the bottle may have some value for the plastic or glass.

In this country you can see bottle collectors on every open party venue. Most of the time it is elderly people carrying a big bag of bottles trying to earn some to their small pension. If you are drunk and you see the bottle collector most of the time you would give your empty bottle to the person or put the bottle beside a trash can so it can be found and picked up easy without hustle or dirt. Everyone knows the bottle collectors some are shy and some like to connect with the youth and party with them. They are always friendly.

Once i visited a friend in this country and as he picked me up from the airport with his car i could not even put my feet on the ground of his car. The car was a mess. It had more empty bottles in the car than i have ever seen before inside a car. He explained to me often he runs out of gas and money. But those bottles are his failsafe. He can drive up to a petrol station at any time and scoop up two galons of gas to keep him going again with those bottles. I thought that was funny behavour.

When entering an shared appartment as a party venue for students you would typically find a huge ammount of empty bottles stored somewhere next to the entrance. Most of the time in large plastic bags that take a lot of space and look and smell kind of disgusting. The thing is when the bag is big enough and smelly enough one of the students takes the bag to the shops and buys more alcohol with it.

Why am i telling the story. Maybe a time will come when dirty smelly used bottles are a better store of value than fiat also in our country.