Perhaps milk prices were high enough (perhaps due to regulations) that home delivery was a viable business? Because it’s possible today, but you have to pay quite a bit more than supermarket prices.
This was in the Bronx in the 1950s. Mostly single or two family homes. The population density probably made it feasible.
OK, yes, the density of the Bronx means it might make sense more than a rural or suburban area.
It was a working-class neighborhood, definitely not an area with luxury services.
We no longer got home delivery by sometime in the 1960s, but don’t know if it was due to supermarket milk getting cheaper.
My mother was quite frugal; but we often did the shopping only every week or two. I don’t think milk would have kept that long, even if two weeks’ worth of milk for a family with three children all expected to drink milk at each meal would have fit in a 1950’s refrigerator and left room for anything else in there. However I never got the impression that she thought the delivery was expensive. We also had icecream delivered, from a different company that only came every couple of weeks, and we had a separate freezer to store it in (along with a lot of other things; it was a big chest freezer.) If it had been expensive to get the icecream delivered, I’m absolutely sure that we would have bought it when we did the grocery shopping; we bought other frozen stuff there.
My recollection of the milk at the time is that it tasted a lot better; which might have been true (different feed and breeds of cow, most likely) or might be my recollection being incorrect and/or the difference between adult and child tastebuds.
Labor and gas costs for the delivery would have been a lot less, but I don’t know whether they were relatively a lot less compared to overall inflation.
Good point about daily delivery being much more important for milk than other groceries. There were six kids in my family, and my mother would have had to be running back and forth to the supermarket every day. (Later she started making powdered milk, which we hated.)
Somewhere I think there is an income equality component to this. The town I grew up in had about 1,000 people and a school system with 50-60 kids per grade. It supported 3 grocery stores (Super Value, Fairway and an independent (which also had a dry goods selection), two hardware stores (Gambles and Hardware Hank), at least two gas stations (Pure Oil/Union 76 and Conoco), a bowling alley, two cafes and the city owned bar/liquor store. And a milk man, but I’m pretty sure that was a side gig for him (and don’t have any idea where he sourced his milk from).
Not exactly sure what my point is, but all that is left there is one grocery, one gas station and now two bars (the city sold their monopoly). Things are undoubtedly cheaper relative to inflation, but I’m not certain that is a good thing.
Huh. Now I don’t remember if we had milk service on our dirt road a couple miles from town in upstate NY in the late 70s. I would have remembered if our house got it personally, but I seem to remember some of the neighbors talking about the glass cans they got their deliveries in.
We did, however, occasionally go into town to a dairy store to buy milk rather than at the grocery store. I don’t remember why. It was right in the middle of downtown, as opposed to the grocery stores which were slightly more out of the way, so maybe we did it occasionally because it was convenient.
I think gas (and transportation in general) being cheap relative to inflation, and, conversely, real estate being expensive, probably explains a lot of the hollowing out of even towns that aren’t big enough for a big box store. If everyone can afford to drive 30+ miles to a cheaper place then they (in general*) will.
*Some people would remain doing business locally due to principle or convenience, some people would just wing it, some people would try to get a handle on whether it’s worth it to make a long trip to save a few dollars, and some people would drive however long it took to save a quarter even if they lose money in the deal.
When we had milk delivered, it was back in the '50s, in a sparsely-populated blue-collar suburb. The thing is, every family had only one car, which the husband drove to work. The women had to walk to the store and schlep back all their groceries. Milk is heavy, so it made sense to pay the extra cost of having it delivered.
And there were no supermarkets back then/there. So they had to walk to the grocer, butcher, baker, etc. I remember when the first supermarket opened. It was a really big deal.
Weird. Yes, we had to do showers and they made sure we went in, but no one checked out our junk.
Some kids wore their jack strap or even shorts, but that was stupid as they’d get smelly in the locker.
I dont remember taking home my shorts or shirt more than once a semester.
Glass bottles have been shown to make all sorts of things better to many.
However, on the Farm in Sask, I hated milk fresh from the cow.
We had home delivery milk from the local Co-Op, in a small town in Sask.
One point to consider: when I was growing up, Dad took the car to work, and Mom and us kids didn’t have transport. Before the two-car family, that would certainly give an economic incentive to home delivery of milk in small towns and rural areas.
I can get milk in glass; but it still doesn’t taste like I remember.
– Milk fresh from the cow can be disconcerting if you’re used to drinking it cold, because if it’s really straight from the cow it’s warm. That wasn’t what I usually drank as a child, though, although I did get it occasionally at somebody’s house; but we didn’t keep a cow, and the milk we bought was sold cold and pasteurized, though generally not homogenized.
My mother said the pasteurized milk was no good for making homemade cottage cheese, you needed raw milk for it to come out right. I’ve heard some backing for that from cheesemakers – apparently the reason I couldn’t get an old blintze recipe to work was that the “cottage cheese” it called for was the homemade version, and would have had a different texture than the pasteurized stuff I was buying at the store.
– Northern_Piper, you’re right about the car issue. Not a lot of families had two cars.
There wasn’t milk delivery when I was a kid , but there were few dairys in the neighbrhood. I don’t mean cow pastures or the place where milk was processed , but stores that basically only sold dairy products and items that went with them , like chocolate syrup and ice cream cones. Haven’t seen one of them in years, but I know when I was a kid we went to one every week - I assume that grocery stores didn’t carry dairy products back then.
We had a milkman delivery service until about 1973. We had a form we kept on the fridge and you ticked off the box or wrote how many you wanted of each item. The form was for a month if I remember correctly. If we weren’t home he let himself in the backdoor and left our stuff in the fridge.
We were 3 kids and I recall the standard delivery was 5 half-gallon bottles either 2 or 3x/week. Hugely heavy.
We always had 2 cars in our generic SoCal middle-class suburban area, but that was more a function of Dad’s job, where he’d be gone for 3 to 6 days at a crack. Just not practical to leave Mom & kids locked in the house for a week. The nearest retail was too far to practically walk, much less carrying stuff & managing children.
Speaking of heavy grocery items and no car…
For a while my mom had a part-time job selling bleach over the phone. I think she sold a lot too. A gallon of bleach is just as heavy as a gallon of milk.
How about dry cleaning pick up and delivery? There were regular pick-ups and deliveries when I was a kid (in the 50’s). The driver had a regular route, and you put a card in your front window to let him know to stop and pick up the laundry. Come to think of it, they did regular laundry, too, because my father had his white shirts laundered and pressed by them.
Oh, and I just remembered something else. I worked for Marshall Field & Co (very high end department store in the Chicago area) in the mid 70’s and they still had a delivery service for your purchases. You went shopping there and you could have your purchases delivered by their own delivery service.