The problem with this, certainly in an Irish context, is that consumers aren't all that motivated to engage with something like this.
I studied consumer marketing once upon a time, and Ireland very much fits into the description of so called hedonistic consumers. We value the experience of shopping and a bit of luxury and convenience is attractive. Most shoppers aren't driven by utility and aren't very price sensitive. A lot people us won't be able to tell you the price of a litre of milk or a loaf of bread, but we would probably tell you that the display was lovely.
Basically, it's an audience who are highly unlikely to engage with this, yet it was rammed through based on experience in entirely different markets with very different consumer behaviour patterns.
If you look at the history of coupon schemes and so on here, people don't tend to get very excited about them and don't bother collecting them. The engagement is often very low.
We even tend to rather half heartedly engage in loyalty point schemes and so on, unless there's some very significant incentive and the whole thing's all reduced down to a very simple mobile phone app that requires very little time spent engaging with it and we're reminded constantly at the till.
This scheme is asking people to collect bottles and cans, bulky and uncrushed and then drive to the supermarket and spend 10 mins loading them one by one carefully into a machine to get some bit of paper with a barcode on it to get at most a couple of Euro off their shopping.
A few % will engage mostly because they've a strong environmental commitment, the rest won't.
Then you also have all the practical issues with the scheme : It's requiring people to store bottles, which is fine if you're in the suburbs somewhere - it might not be if you're in a smaller home.
It assumes that you can drive to a supermarket. That's not always the case if you're elderly in particular and there's a % of people who use home delivery shopping / online shopping who are not being addressed at all and the PR around this scheme just glossed over that as if it didn't matter.
It also ignores the fact that about 2/3 of us live in areas with very low population densities, so if you drive to a supermarket and the machine doesn't work, you're not likely to drive 20 mins to some other supermarket to offload a few bottles - even from an environmental point of view that makes little sense.
I've elderly relatives who are very annoyed about it. They've fixed incomes. They're from a generation that's more aware of saving a few pennies here and there and really pay attention and they are the very people who probably would use the scheme, but can't because they mostly use home delivery services.
The solution being proposed is 'oh just ask a friend, family member or neighbour.' That's lovely, but it's also very disempowering and I've one relative who considered it HIGHLY patronising to the point she's unlikely to vote for anyone who supported this.
What I don't understand is why they couldn't have just tried a collection system that operated plastic bottles at the kerbside. Instead, we seem to have spent probably tens of millions of Euro on a load of reverse vending machines, which btw had to be purchased by the retailers (at their own expense) under the legislation and has just been passed back on to the general price of groceries.
If they'd made this super convenient for consumers, had a nice PR campaign and used a lot of carrots rather than sticks - it would have worked.
Anyway, we'll see how it goes in a few months time. I don't predict a sudden surge of engagement.
