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  **Life in the Soviet Union was full of miracles. And one such miracle is how people handed in bottles to change it for booze or buy bread.**


  Points for the reception of bottles and cans began to appear widely in the 1970s and existed inertially for several years after the collapse of the USSR.
    Collection and delivery of used dishes were considered as a serious business enterprise capable of significantly replenishing the family budget, which allows finding additional funds for drinking, etc.

 
Where did the same "dishes" come from. Dairy products (milk, kefir, cream, etc.) began to be widely sold in glass containers around the beginning of the 1960s, before that in smaller cities they were sold exclusively for bottling, but bottled milk was only in large cities.

Bottles for ordinary milk, melted milk, kefir and cream were typical, differing only in the color of the top foil lid - white for milk, yellow for melted, green for kefir and, it seems, purple for cream. Still there were typical beer bottles (0.5) and bottles for vodka and wine (0.5 and 0.7), as well as typical cans - from mayonnaise, from sour cream and canned food and large 3 liter. All this dishes were taken at the points of glass containers reception - most of all there were beer and milk bottles and mayonnaise small jars. Banks used more on the farm,
and three-liter "cylinders" in general, no one ever gave up - they used for home canning

   The price of all that was sold in the USSR in glass containers, included the collateral value of "glass", which was very high, much higher than the real value of bottles. This was done allegedly so that the "conscious citizens" did not throw away bottles, but went to take them, but in fact it was a simple price wrap, really unjustified
. The price of the bottle was about 10% of the cost of wine, about 5% of the cost of vodka and half of the cost of beer

The items of glass containers began to appear widely around the mid-1970s, most often in the same room or next to grocery stores. As a rule, these were small dark rooms, half filled with plastic boxes with empty containers, with an indescribable smell of brewer's yeast and fumes inside.
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There were also special rules for the reception of glass containers, which were closely monitored by the receivers - the bottles should have been free from extraneous smells (medicines, kerosene, etc.), without signs of foreign liquids (like oil), and without labels.

Who usually went to take bottles? It will not be a big exaggeration to say that absolutely all layers of the population handed over empty bottles to the USSR - for a half-liter bottle of milk at the point of reception, glass containers were given 15 kopecks, per liter - 20. Fifty-liter bottles of milk cost 10 rubles - chervonets at "average" salary in the 120-
150 rubles and total poverty was quite appreciable money.

There were also "professional bottles", usually from local alcoholics (more often) or very poor single pensioners (less often) who walked around and collected empty bottles in popcorn string bags, then carried these swollen mesh bottles to the glass containers reception points and long quarreled with the receiver due to chips on the neck.

In the Brezhnev era, even several thematic jokes appeared that emphasized the importance of the amounts raised from the delivery of bottles, such as "I drank for many years, and then took up my mind, handed over bottles and bought Zhiguli" or "In the country of victorious socialism, a person is really protected - if there is no money , you can always go and drop bottles. "


Now only the poorest homeless people are engaged in this, and during the USSR it was standard practice for all layers of the poor population, whose average salary was about 1000 milk bottles.


*Photos were taken from the Internet. References to the images under the photograph*