Half the year, November through April, I’ve been living in La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for about a decade. Before that, I spent parts of my winters in various other parts of Mexico and Guatemala. Being an unrepentant alcoholic, but mindful of keeping enough gray matter together to satisfy my other biological urges, I’ve maintained beer as my beverage of choice. And being lazy, and therefore with low income, I spend as little as possible maintaining my buzz.
Mexico still re-uses beer bottles, and you can usually save a few cents by buying the reusable bottles over the disposables. Not all stores accept the old bottles though, and some only accept from one of the two big conglomerates (Modelo and Cuauhtemoc-Moctezuma) and not the other. And none of them, to my knowledge, give you money for the empties, only a credit towards your purchase of a new beer. At my preferred dispensary, Licores y Vinos Los Paceños, that credit is 5 pesos (about 25 cents currently) for the “cuartito” (210ml, 7.1 ounces) and “media” (355ml, 12 ounces) sizes, and double that for the ballena/cuguama (940 ml, quart, 32 ounces) and ballenón/caguamón (1.2l, 40 ounces) sizes. I suspect it’s the same all over La Paz, but since they’re all coy about the depósito, I have no easy way of knowing for sure.
In any case, getting back to my headline, a media of Pacifico Clara is, currently, $15.50 (pesos, of course; they use the “dollar sign” same as we do, though their peso is currently valued on the world market as less than 1/20th of the US Dollar). At 12 ounces each, that’s $31.00 (pesos) for two, but a ballena (quart) costs only $30.00. So it’s like getting 8 ounces plus a peso back if you get the larger size rather than 2 of the smaller. And a ballenón is only 3 pesos more, $33.00, so there’s an extra pint for 2 pesos, 10 US cents. Clearly, they’re subsidizing upsizing when it comes to beer. And I’m not too proud to accept that gratuitous subsidy.