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http://www.winonadailynews.com/news/article_fdc1a03a-1288-11e2-a0ce-001a4bcf887a.html

Don't panic Vendo 39/44 owners, Cavaleir 51 etc.... These are not to be confused with the 8oz no deposit bottles still in production. You can still get ammo for your belts and drums.

WOW...The last bottle off the line brought $2000 at auction.....The remaining 5000 or so filled bottles are being sold off at $20 a pop.

Brian

Thanks.  I like to use the 8 oz bottles in my USS64 and was thinking those were going out of production!!  Whew.  

Does anyone know where the 6.5oz bottles produced by this company were being sold?  I thought the 6.5 oz size as a refill was long out of production. There have been threads on this site about sanitizing used 6.5 oz bottles and hand transferring coke from larger bottles to be recapped with small scale cappers.

they have been rebottling the 6.5 oz for years.. that is why this is sooo historic.. they where the last one in the country still bottling the old original bottles..

I've been down there several times to buy bottles over the years and got to know the owners and shared stories with them about my Grandfather and his days in the bottling business..

It's pretty sad that this has to go away...

The guy who bought the last bottle for 2,000 is the owner of Viking Coca-Cola out of St. Cloud MN, which is the company that my Grandfather sold our Bottling and distribution operation to in 1989.

If I read that right some of those bottles were made in 1948.
WHY is coke using plastic! Might be cheaper now but one purchase lasts 74 years seems like a good idea. I'd love to see glass for all soda. And bring back the deposit (we don't have one here), makes picking up,trash fun for kids.


Oh, if you didn't notice I'm kinda biased toward coke in glass bottles. It's just better on every level.

Agreed!!  I LOVED riding my bike around in Northern California and finding the glass bottles on the side of the road!  I picked them up and took them back to the Safeway supermarket, where I got 10 cents a piece!  That was big money for a kid at that time!  Great memories.

It seems to me it would be cheaper in the long run to wash and refill the returns for 10, 20 or 30 years or more rather than constantly buying plastic throwaways, but I'm sure that's not the case.  I still remember going with my mom to the store in the early 80s to get 7up in the large glass bottles for their cocktails.  I would pick out the older bottles and keep them rather than return them.  Every other trip or so I would score a bottle from the mid-50s...made my day!

Besides...tastes better from glass!!

I used to collect returnable bottles for the mere 5c we got in the midwest as well as pop top cans. We'd use the claw end of a claw hammer to seperate the aluminum ends off the steel bodies for the recycle value. That was a lot of work and took a LOT of cans to get just a dollar worth of aluminum.

      Yes, it would be cheaper to make the bottles one time and refill them, than to keep making glass bottles, then recycle them by melting the glass and remaking them all over again.
      My guess is lawyers were getting their payday by filing chipped glass lawsuits.
      Plastic throwaways don't seem to really get thrown away either, I understand there is a huge collection of plastics the size of an iceburg, floating somewhere in the Pacific ocean.

I vote to make a raft out of the plastics bottles, put all the lawyers on it and let them float around the Pacific!  :biggrin:

They quit re-using the 6.5 oz bottles because everybody and his brother is selling them on ebay!
Besides, no one in the US makes glass bottles anymore.

All good info guys. Was this company really running production or were they running just a few cases per year?  Wheer the heck were they being sold?

This bottling plant was running about 6,000 cases every couple of months I believe... earlier on they where bottling once a month... and they sold thier product around their general vicinity and then some guys like me and others would drive Hours to pick up cases of bottles every 6 months or so...
they had some stores and shops in the City they where in , still selling the bottles out of a few older machines like Cav 72 in the local barber shop, and another shop had a chest cooler with bottles in it..

was talking with my cousin last night who was also in the bottling business in Pine City MN.. and he has the very last 6.5 and 16oz bottle that came off the Pine City bottling line when they stopped in 1986 or so...

Thanks for the good infor SIGN GUY.  I suppose the local shops are all sold out now.  The rel thick glass 6.5 oz bottles were always the best coke

What a sad day. I have been taking annual trips up there every summer. It looks like they ran a bunch of embossed botttles for the last run. Normally they didn't use these. The bottles that I got from Winona were from the 60's and 70's. There were some that were the transitional bottles and I even have seen some from the 90's. Looks like I am going to have to find a new owner for all of these bottles....and so I have room for more returnables from the Wisconsin bottlers.

Luckily now Coca Cola is making Coke, Coke Zero, Diet Coke and Sprite in 8oz. small "aluminum" bottles with a twist off cap. They look awesome and the bottles have great color but again cost to retailers per case is $34 which is why there is not a line to buy these things. Retail they run $1.99 to $2.49ea. Cost you an arm and a leg to fill any soda machine you might have and if you do fill it then you have to pray that nobody actually wants to drink one.

One reason I started going to Winona is because of how much the eight ounce bottles cost. The cost of a case of the returnable bottles was about eight bucks.

I remember the first time I went there , cost was 6.85 a case.. he gave me employee pricing as he knew my grandfather and our bottling plant we had.. that as when Clint was still running the show..
I would bring down 12-15 cases of original Embossed bottles and they would Fill those for me, when i picked those up I'd leave another 15 cases of embossed ones for them to fill for me so every trip I picked up embossed bottles...  it was very cool.. and will be missed!

back to just filling them at home with a funnel and capper.. granted don't have original caps but still fun to have in the machines..

Just a few years ago I could buy returnable 6.5 oz in the Lynchburg and Roanoke, VA areas, but obviously that ended. Now I buy the Mexican Cokes at Costco, but I noticed the price on the 8 oz bottles dropped about a dollar a six pack recently.

In the early 60 s we would get up 10 coke bottles and walk down to the store and get us a kite and a ball of string. That was fun just looking for bottles to return for a penny

       Yeah. I remember finding a six pack of empty bottles. Walked half a mile to the store, the guy gave me 12 cents for them. I bought a Coke for 10 cents plus his
2 cents deposit, and I left broke again!  :biggrin: