I took down my bottle top explanation until further review. There’s a flaw in the reasoning so I’m now I’m even more perplexed. I hope to have a new post up next week.
Ooops
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It made sense to me. Have you tried checking it by asking to watch the clerk throw away the bottle cap? It would seem a little eccentric, but if they complied you'd have your test.
Was it because they could sell the drinks to you from the fountain cheaper and with less of a chance of theft?
I just e-mail Aramark to ask for an "Official Answer". Who knows if they will respond.
I didn't have a chance to read the comments to your solution, but I thought that since top-less bottles are an inconvenience to the costumers this is a cost for the seller and therefore it's not clear if this cost is comparable to the possibility of theft by the employees.
Surely the flaw was that if you couldn't trust the vendors not to pocket the cash, you couldn't rely on them to take off the bottle tops. So they'd give you the drink with it on, and pocket the cash.
In some places (I think Australia), money is paid to people who recycle bottles and bottle tops. It could be that they made some money back in that way.
Actually, accepting the stated reason may be the best answer even if it seems odd.
Just because it doesn't remove 100% of the potential caps that can be thrown on the field (remember that some bottles can be brought in with caps intact) doesn't mean that it's not the legitimate reason behind the policy. People do odd things all the time.
I ran a baseball concession for a Rookie League team one summer, and it is certainly true that you have to have a good inventory control system, and reconcile products to the till at the end of the night. We always counted cups and buns to have a product count, before the shift and after. I just don't see how the bottle caps would work as an effective inventory control device, since the vendor could simply stick the cap with the money in their pocket, and defeat the system.
I wonder if it is not a clean up issue. Those pesky caps could be very difficult to clean up, much moreso that the paper products and even empty plastic bottles.
I don't go to sports stadia very often, but I would guess that buying a soda with the cap off you would tend to buy a smaller volume bottle and then make repeat purchases during the game, rather than buy one large bottle and have it go flat.
I did not see the inventory tracking solution before it was taken down. What was it? Was it to prevent the sellers bringing in their own supplies purchased at wholesale prices, then keeping the entire margin on the sales for themselves? The problem is that they can still do that, and simply conceal and dispose of the caps from the black market sodas.
Perhaps it was a response to some regulation or threat of regulation, which has ossified in place from some long-distant time.
I just read the earlier post on bottle caps. What I'd like to know is why you bought a hot dog and pretzel at the stadium instead of bringing your own food from home…like my parents used to do for us growing up. They found every way to save money, including at sporting events – they were poor immigrants to this country -without being "cheap." They're now worth around 8 figures. Bring a sandwich or two from home next time.
To give one example, before the days of all-you-can-drink fast food servings, my dad would buy me and my brother 1 large coke and pour it in 2 dixie cups or he would bring his own can sodas for us into, say, McDonald's from the car and purchase the rest from McDonald's.
The inventory control suggestion seems like a pretty good answer and so does the recycle suggestion. I imagine that a plastic bottle shredder — the type that cuts plastic into tiny bits so that it can be used for new products — is probably not designed to eat through bottle caps just as easily. So perhaps eliminating the cap from bottle segregation step in the recycle process substantially lowers total recycling costs.
But perhaps that suggestion I found most plausible was that of the first respondent, Jack. Jack suggested that someone willing to wait in line (an economic cost) could turn around and find buyers that would be willing to purchase beer at a premium price to compensate the seller for the wait time. I mean, heck, why not spend your time waiting in a line at a Nats game…there's probably a TV monitor that you can watch the game from so that you wouldn't miss some former Nats/Expos player — one of the many super talented that left for a bigger contract — perform excellently against his former organization.
Do you happen to know the limit to the amount of bottled beer one could purchase in a single transaction?
I think the stadium must have a bulk or exclusive purchase agreement for the sodas it sells at the games. To prevent the stadium from selling bottles to other local stores in bulk and undercutting the distributor (coke or pepsi) in these other areas, the distributor could require the return of caps off all sodas sold at the games. This way if the stadium resells bottles to a store, it would not have the caps and it would lose its discount for bottles that it bought without returning the caps.
you can throw a full, bottled soda a HELL of a lot farther and w/ more force (and more incognito) than an open one.
I still say it's all about the prixes on the bottle cap- but I didn't get to read the aborted inventory control explanation (which is probably better). I just happen to win a free drink the same day I read that entry.
BTW, changing the name of the blog to CafeLove may get you more hits. Just thinking out loud here . . .
The safety issue – to prevent sealed bottles being used as missiles – is certainly the correct explanation. I don't know why they allow sealed bottles to be brought in from outside, but a lot of other venues do not allow this.
E.g. From the security page of the Pepsicenter in Denver:
http://www.pepsicenter.com/Events/Security.asp
Water Bottles/Bottles or Lids in General
Pepsi Center’s policy on water bottles is empty water bottles with the lids removed and thrown away may be brought into Pepsi Center. Any guest found with a water bottle with a lid on it may be asked to throw away the lid. Guests refusing to comply may be ejected from the facility.
Within Pepsi Center, all bottles sold will have the lids removed and immediately thrown away by the seller to prevent the bottles from being used as a missile.