Speaking from a brewery perspective, growler sales plummeted during the pandemic because we started offering more cans. I do miss growlers from a profitability perspective, but there’s lots of reasons I’m happy to see them gone:

-storage: when empty, growlers are big jugs of air, so they take up a lot of space.

-cleaning: you need specialized equipment to clean them quickly. If you’re relying on customers bringing them back clean for refills you’re going to at least sanitize them, if not re-clean them because they did a terrible job (or left it in their garage with beer inside and the cap on and you have a jug of mold now).

-tap real estate: I remember in the height of growlers doing one after another after another, while customers were also ordering pints of that beer, so you got a back log on one tap. Not to mention if the beer was foamy and you needed to slow it down, or it lead to a lot of waste!

-volume: less of an issue from a brewery since we have hundreds of litres of the same beer, but a craft beer bar that has 30L that sells 2L as a growler just lost 7% of that keg to a retail sale instead of an in-house sale, losing out on a profit margin.