| | Speaking of urban legends, do you remember ripping the tabs off pop cans and saving them up for charity?
If you ask most people (at least in North America) they will tell you that in elementary school they saved the tabs off of pop cans for some charitable purpose. Usually it was to pay for some healthcare provision that wasn't covered under MediCare. Why on earth would they do this? This is just another urban legend. There is no organisation that takes pop can tabs as payment for some charitable good!
If you ask people (and I have) why they think that you can redeem the tabs from pop cans for charity, they say that it is because you can sell the aluminium for money. This is certainly the case with copper - there are companies that will buy reclaimed copper in order to be able to recycle it. But if this was the case, why wouldn't you save the whole entire can?!?! You'd get a lot more money for that than you would for the puny tabs!
According to what I read, this urban legend originated back when you needed to pull a tab off of a drink can to get it open. Obviously today the drink cans are designed so that you don't need to pull the tabs off, but that might just help perpetuate the urban myth - it is now more rewarding to collect tabs for imaginary charities, because you actually have to do some 'work' for it.
The most amazing manifestation of this urban myth that I have ever seen was at the Metro grocery store in Ottawa; the one at Viewmount and Merivale. At one of the check-out counters, someone had put a clear plastic container with a hole cut out the top of it on display. There were a small number of pop can tabs in the bottom of this container, but to be honest, I don't think that number ever grew. Underneath the container was hand-printed note. In child's writing, it urged customers to save the tabs from their pop cans. For all I know, that thing is still there.
These big block letters said, and I'm not kidding you: "Please save the tabs from pop cans. We are collecting them. We need 4 million to get a wheelchair."
It is so ridiculous that you think I am making this up, but I am not. FOUR MILLION TABS to get a SINGLE WHEELCHAIR!!!!
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW UNECONOMICAL THIS IS?? It's staggering!!
We don't even have to assume that a single can of pop costs $1 (which is what the price ususally is in a vending machine). Even at the lowest imaginable price, the scheme is just ridiculous! If you were buying no-name cola, in bulk, on sale you could probably get cans at $0.12 a pop. A simple internet search turns up a company selling wheelchairs that start at $99. FOUR MILLION pop cans at $0.12 would cost $480,000. In what bizarro world would this be considered a good bargain?? At what terrible elementary school did this scheme to collect FOUR MILLION pop can tabs have its genesis?? Any right-thinking person has to know that this is nothing more than a CRAZY urban legend!
Actually, come to think of it, I am quite sure that if you showed up at the headquarters of the cola company with a truckload of FOUR MILLION OF THEIR POP CAN TABS, I have no trouble believing that they would give you any wheelchair your heart desired!
My biggest regret - in my life - is that I never took my camera to the grocery store with me.
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| | Posted 10/22/2009 2:55 AM - 37 Views - 0 eProps - 1 Comment
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