Ouch!
Personally, I find this fiat to be really disingenuous. No Michigan food/beverage retailer has chosen to stop selling beer, pop and mixers that require the ten cent deposit at the time of sale. But none of us can return them to the point of purchase for a refund for the foreseeable future!
It’s a win-lose transaction for Michigan consumers.
That seems to be the case here in NY as well, although our deposit is only half of what MI charges. I understand the abundance of caution but it does seem a bit unfair that they are continuing to charge the deposit.
Wow, I didn’t know this. I never return them for the deposit, I leave them in the recycling for the bottle/can people who support themselves by collecting them. What are those folks going to do? That’s going to be another Corona disaster.
I do the same (in NY). In Michigan, literally EVERYONE takes their bottles back (to Meijer, of course). We used to do fundraisers in high school, going door to door asking for deposit bottles. I don’t think we ever encountered a single house that didn’t have a dedicated trash can for them!
I buy very little of anything in deposit-bottles (and also leave the few I do amass for collectors, one of whom seems to be my building’s “regular”), so it took a while before before I noticed they’d suspended redemptions. But I had noticed the absence of the collectors in the past week or two, who around here are virtually all older Chinese immigrants (I say immigrants rather than ethnic Chinese because the ones I’ve had any reason to speak to have invariably barely spoken any English at all). But I was thinking they’d stopped either because they were themselves avoiding going out any more than necessary or maybe because they were afraid of anti-Chinese sentiment (though there doesn’t seem to have been any of that around here, where there’s a fairly significant number of ethnic Chinese residents ‡…) Now I guess, maybe not…? Especially if they didn’t stop of their own accord, I hope for their sake most of them live with family and/or get some sort of public assistance so don’t have to actually rely on what they earn - which can’t be very much in absolute numbers - just to “subsist”… sigh
‡ ETA: According to a headline I noticed in our fairly big local newspaper, there were a couple of asshole “local officials” of some sort who were discovered sending emails (and maybe posting on FB?) urging people to avoid Chinese-run businesses a couple of weeks ago, but they found themselves summarily dismissed when it came to light…
Our refundables Cubby, nine days into the returns ban…
We also have two fabric grocery bags in our car filled with bottles I was unable to return last week! 
Our state run bottle drops, which are warehouse sized, are still open in Oregon, but stores are currently not taking returns, till at the moment, thru tomorrow,
First they said because the store employees were too busy, then to minimize virus transmission.
