You’d still have to go to the supermarket for many other things, so I’m not sure what advantage there is in getting milk delivered.
Me either, I never had milk delivered even when the kids were little.
I think my neighbors just like to support a local business. Other reasons I’ve heard is that the milk is better and fresher, and in the past people had just been getting delivery all along. I checked the prices some years back, seemed about the same as you’d see at the grocery. I wouldn’t be surprised if these were old family businesses carrying on a tradition.
Most things I get from the grocery store, I’d be perfectly fine buying only every month or two. If it weren’t for milk, I could just only go grocery shopping that often, and just buy a whole lot at once. But milk won’t last that long, so I have to go to the grocery store more often.
There used to be milk delivery in my neighborhood. It was in glass bottles, that you had to return. I never bought from them, because it cost a lot more than milk at the store, but a lot of my neighbors did.
And oh, hey, googling tells me that not only are they still in business, they have “paused” signing up new customers due to increased demand during the epidemic.
Do you like milk that much? I can’t remember the last time I drank milk. It’s been years. I think I really only ever consumed it when having cereal, but since I don’t ever buy cereal, I never get milk. It’s not that I hate it or anything. It’s just not something I ever think to buy. And I don’t miss it. Is it worth it to you to make special trips to the store just for milk? Have you ever considered not buying milk? Do you get it because you like it that much, or because it’s just a habit and something that you’ve always had in the fridge? Just curious.
I love milk. I have milk for breakfast every day I eat at home. I put milk in my coffee if I eat breakfast elsewhere. (At home I have tea without milk, but I find crappy coffee with milk more acceptable than crappy tea.) I sometimes make a late-night snack of cocoa. I like a glass of milk with pie or cake. It’s hard for me to think of other any single food I would miss as much. Yeah, it’s worth it to me to keep milk in stock.
We have shifted to mostly ultra-pasteurized brands during the corona crisis because those will keep a month in the back of the fridge, if you don’t open them.
I’ve never had milk go off in less than seven days past the printed date. It didn’t smell or taste sour or clot. Perfectly drinkable. I’ve only had milk go bad before the expiration date once. It was stored in my refrigerator and unopened, so I was quite surprised. But that was an anomaly . Milk will keep at least five days if properly refrigerated.
My habitual breakfast is a bowl of cereal and milk, so yes, I do go through it. Obviously home milk delivery would be a poor choice for someone who does not consume milk.
Nobody seems to have mentioned filtered milk:
https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/waitrose-filtered-semi-skimmed-milk/808744-443888-443889
I can confirm it does last for a long time.
Thanks for all the replies. 
The milk smelt and tasted fine and has been consumed.
No ill effects.
Stay safe everyone!
I knew a milkman back in West Texas. He delivered to stores. Said the real use-by date was actually five days – I think he said five – past what was stamped on the carton but that the company wanted to be cautious.
Come back tomorrow and tell us that! :eek: 
My opinion: I’ve used old-ish milk to the point that it was just beginning to smell and taste a bit sour, with no ill effects. But if it gets to the point of being more-than-slightly unpleasant, I dump it. Note that I use it in cooked dishes like hot cereal, not straight out of the fridge, if that makes a difference. So far, I’ve almost always lived to tell about it.
Partially, but only partially, off-topic:
What about the date stamped on meat like ground beef? Is that the date it was packaged? Or the sell-by date? Or the best-used-by date? (Sometimes the label says.)
I saw this :eek: happening at a supermarket once:
Ground beef was looking a bit old-ish. You can tell it’s been sitting there for a few days because of the juice (a.k.a. blood) that oozed out and sitting all around the corners of the package. It looks kinda gross.
So there was the meat counter employee, collecting all this old-ish ground beef. One by one, he unwrapped them, put the hunk of ground beef into a new styrofoam pallet, and re-wrapped it with fresh shrink-wrap, and put a brand new label on it with a new date.
I called him out in that and asked what he was doing. He said the date simply meant the date it was packaged. So if it got a few days old sitting on the shelf, it sufficed to re-package it and put a new label with a new date on it. :smack:
The juice that leaks out isn’t blood, it’s mostly fluid from inside broken cells. And what makes it red is myoglobin, not hemoglobin.
But that’s pretty gross. Still, I can top that. My husband bought a chicken from the local supermarket when we lived in NYC. I opened it, and it smelled nasty, it had already spoiled. So I took it back. They reimbursed me, but I saw a clerk REPACKAGING THE SPOILED CHICKEN and putting it back on the shelves. I never bought meat from that supermarket again.
I also once bought a package of Del Monte dried apricots there, which, when we opened them, had fermented. And not in a nice way. I wrote to Del Monte, and got 3 letters back, all stuffed into the same envelope.
- We don’t put a “best by” date on the package, because that’s very dependant on temperature, and our product keeps a lot longer in Maine than in Georgia. We give the merchant information on how long our product should be good in their location, and they are supposed to remove it from the shelf after that date. (they may not have listed those states, but is was something like that.)
- Sorry you had a problem, here’s a coupon for more.
- Comparing the product code to our records, that box of fruit had expired, and we paid the merchant (in another state) to dispose of it. It should not have been on the shelves.
So… yeah, not the best market. They were buying products that “fell off the truck”, including ones that “fell off” garbage trucks. They had decent fruit, though.
Oh — and I think my anecdote above illustrates why bananas have become the nation’s most popular fruit. They are one of the few foods that advertises accurately what the quality of the food is before you buy it. You don’t need to poke it or sniff it or interpret tiny print, either. Just look at it, and you can tell how ripe it is, and how bruised it is.
Thanks for the cite. I’m also in the US (Washington State), and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ‘use by’ or ‘best by’ date on milk, only a ‘sell by.’ And I’ve have 4 days in my head as the amount of time to expect milk to last past its sell by date, but I’d probably use it a day or two past if it smelled and tasted ok. I have a toddler now, though, so it never gets to that point.
I don’t eat beef, but the ground turkey I get from Trader Joe’s is specifically stamped as ‘Use or Freeze by’ with the date. I seem to recall that the chicken breasts and thighs are stamped the same way.
If I buy my milk as soon as it hit the shelves (over 10 days before the stamped date) and store in in my very cold fridge ( I usually keep mine right above freezing, at 34F or so), it lasts WAY longer than the stamped date.
Storage temperatures make a huge difference. As does buying the freshest carton on the shelf. Pre-pandemic, I always checked the expiration date of several cartons before picking the freshest one, which was usually way in the back. It’s a habit I’ve recently broken.
In my experience, milk turns sour very suddenly, leaving no room for doubt. It remains usable in the fridge for a week or two, and then suddenly the next day it is completely (and unmistakably) sour.
If you must store it, there is always UHT milk. Not to mention those tins of condensed milk, and also powdered milk.
No need for worry - there’s a simple & highly accurate way to determine whether milk will taste right:
You taste it.
If it has “gone off” more than a short time, the smell will tell you.
It helps that spoiled milk is neither deadly nor vile - it tastes sour; at worst, mildly unpleasant.