No, it is not the same at all! We now have a lot of restrictions on what can be returned to what store. They have to sell those exact bottles. For the automated

No, it is not the same at all! We now have a lot of restrictions on what can be returned to what store. They have to sell those exact bottles. For the automated plastic return stations you even have to have the label still on the bottle - if the label doesn't match, even if the actual bottle is exactly the same, the machine does not accept the return. You can't return everything anywhere. In East Germany it worked for all bottles too, not just for beer bottles. The brewery where I worked also bottled various non-alcoholic drinks, suing the exact same bottles for all. The switch from one liquid to another didn't take long and was quickly performed, just restack different labels, flush the previous liquid, then restart the bottling with little overall delay. The bottles already in the queue remained the same. German: https://www.n-tv.de/ratgeber/Wo-kann-man-welche-Flasche-zurueckgeben-article19892185.html https://www.n-tv.de/ratgeber/Wo-kann-man-welche-Flasche-zuru... ("Inside the German bottle jungle: Where can you return which bottles?")