Recyclable

 Cavern Supermarket was well named. It was at the bottom of a tower-block on a narrow street that was practically an alley.  Before the invaders had come and spent eighty years rebuilding and putting in infrastructure it had been an alley that led from another alley down to a slightly larger street that these days qualified as a main road.  The other buildings along the street had been residential homes first, but had morphed, slowly, into shops with flats above them.  Now there was a hairdressers's where six stylists lounged around looking louche and anorexic and no-one ever seemed to be getting their hair done; there was a pastry shop run by immigrants that did a roaring trade as their pastry recipes were all from their home town and not the locality, and there was a model aeroplane shop with dusty boxes and dead flies in the window that opened twice a day for an hour a time.

Cavern Supermarket opened until 10 every evening and at 7 every morning and was generally busy.  The shop stretched back, like an actual cavern, and took up three floors of the tower block plus the basement level.  There was a parking garage nearby and a secret there that only the workers in the supermarket knew about: the parking garage also had a basement level and that was how the supermarket took in new stock.

At least, it had been a secret (of sorts) until the new scheme had been announced and finally delivered on.  Now it was completely obvious to everyone that there was a basement level, and that there was a problem down there that was stopping anyone else from using the garage.

"Recycle!" proclaimed the signs outside the shop; large plastic banners in bright red and white that were pinned to the walls and across the plate-glass windows.  "Bring your recyclables here!"

On the ground floor, where they used to stack the baskets (both the ones you carried and the ones on wheel, like mini-trolleys) were now four large machines that looked like vending machines but took recyclables off you and gave you money back instead.  The baskets had been moved further into the shop and were creating their own problems as people went looking for them, then tried to return to the entrance to shop as they usually did and the streams of people were too much for the narrow aisles and crowded shop floor. Each machine gleamed in the fluorescent lighting and the easy-to-use slots and buttons were already greasy with unwashed fingers using them and worn at the corners.

The problem was that the locals were attempting to recycle anything and everything as they saw the machines as a source of free cash.  Despite the signs indicating the validity of bottles, plastics, boxes and everything else, the locals were determinedly pushing anything and everything into the slots and then hammering on the machines in an attempt to extract money when the machine declared the item invalid.  One man had even put his baby into the machine and was at the customer service complaining that the euro he'd been given was insufficient for recycling a child.

This in turn had lead to overcrowding of the storage area where the machines were emptied to, and then this had forced the owner of the supermarket, Charles Cavern, to call the operators of the scheme to come and collect all this 'rubbish' as he tactlessly put it.  They sent four large trucks... which promptly got stuck in the narrow alley and the underground parking garage.

Enterprising locals were already considering dismantling the trucks and seeing how much they could get from the machines for recycling them.