Pfand Zurück

The Germans have build a brilliant way to subsidize their world reknown drinking behaviors and save the environment at the same time. In the corner of every Lebensmittelgeschaft (grocery store) is a machine that takes your bottles and cans back. For every bottle you bring in, you get anywhere from 0.10 to 0.25 cents back. It is called Pfand (refund).

That amount may not sound like a lot, but consider the following hypothetical. Let us say that I purchase a bucket of Becks for 17 Euro. This bucket contains four packs and each pack contains six 0.33 L bottles. This gives us a grand total of 24 bottles. 1 L returned is worth 1.45 Euro. Now, I am assuming that most of my audience is American, so I will go ahead and crunch the numbers since you stopped reading this problem a long time ago and failed Remedial Math 51. You get 11.60 Euro in return for bringing the bottles back to the store. This grand total assumes that you and your sexually frustrated friends have not destroyed the SKU on the bottle. If you received the whole amount back, that means you only paid 5.40 Euro for 24 bottles of Becks.

Please note: An unintended consequence of so much drinking may result in health problems, unwanted pregnancy, and learning to play Euchre, which the French are cheating bastards at.

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