Refers to the pathetically-selfish practice of a
miser’s offering a naïve fellow human one or more huge
trash bags full of returnable containers as payment for his running one or more errands and/or performing some task around the
shyster’s house or property, only for the hapless
workman to later discover that the bags merely contain a comparatively few very large (i.e., gallon and/or 2-/3-liter) plastic containers, rather than the logically-expected “haul” of many dozens of ordinary-sized glass/plastic drink-bottles and aluminum beverage-cans; he is thus being paid only a small fraction of the “apparent reimbursement” that the gigantic bulging bags had “implied”.
I always insist on either “counting through” bags of bottles/cans before accepting them as payment for something, or having clear-plastic sacks be used to
bag up the returnables, so that I can actually see the size/type/number of the
containers inside the bags, and thus be more sure of getting the approximate reimbursement that I’ve been led to believe I’d be receiving as my end of the deal... there are
waaaay too many advantage-takers out there who are eager to try to pull the ol' "super-size returnable-container swindle" on people like me.
