Android
12-21-2005, 03:32 AM
Was recently digging through my filing cabinet and found the ad below. This was from the Des Moines Register, June 17, 1998. Announcing the end of returnable 16 ounce bottles. :-(
This was the bottler that had one large bottling operation in Waterloo, Iowa that filled returnables for all of General Bottlers Iowa territories, over half the state. Only a couple of years earlier it was doing large volumes of returnables. The ad talks about "business performance" showing that these were no longer preferred, but I don't know if that is totally accurate. Their biggest outlet, Hy-Vee supermarkerts, had recently allowed their store managers to drop the product if they wanted to, which resulted in about I think half of those stores no longer selling them. I suspect Pepsi didn't fight this policy, and allowed the business to dwindle. They probably wanted to get out of the returnable bottling business anyway, the bottles they were using were in rough shape and breakage was very common.
Anyway, before they shut it down, PCGB ran a LOT of returnables and over-stocked a few stores with this final stock. If you knew where to go, you could find them avaialble months later. It was the day after Thanksgiving that I made my final trip out to Des Moines for these. The store I shopped at, was down to like a couple of pallets of these at the front of the store where months before a line of like 15 had been stacked. I wish I had brought my camera one of those times. Anyway, they still had one of the newspaper ads tacked up somewhere near the bottles, and I stole it for posterity.
I was sad, but knew I still could get the AD Heusing 12 ounce returnable bottles in Davenport. IA. That didn't end until 3 years later.
-Andy
http://members.trainorders.com/android/Pepsi/ColaWarVeteranRetiresAd.jpg
This was the bottler that had one large bottling operation in Waterloo, Iowa that filled returnables for all of General Bottlers Iowa territories, over half the state. Only a couple of years earlier it was doing large volumes of returnables. The ad talks about "business performance" showing that these were no longer preferred, but I don't know if that is totally accurate. Their biggest outlet, Hy-Vee supermarkerts, had recently allowed their store managers to drop the product if they wanted to, which resulted in about I think half of those stores no longer selling them. I suspect Pepsi didn't fight this policy, and allowed the business to dwindle. They probably wanted to get out of the returnable bottling business anyway, the bottles they were using were in rough shape and breakage was very common.
Anyway, before they shut it down, PCGB ran a LOT of returnables and over-stocked a few stores with this final stock. If you knew where to go, you could find them avaialble months later. It was the day after Thanksgiving that I made my final trip out to Des Moines for these. The store I shopped at, was down to like a couple of pallets of these at the front of the store where months before a line of like 15 had been stacked. I wish I had brought my camera one of those times. Anyway, they still had one of the newspaper ads tacked up somewhere near the bottles, and I stole it for posterity.
I was sad, but knew I still could get the AD Heusing 12 ounce returnable bottles in Davenport. IA. That didn't end until 3 years later.
-Andy
http://members.trainorders.com/android/Pepsi/ColaWarVeteranRetiresAd.jpg