Hmm, let me count… I bought a liter for 98 cents (in euros that is) so… $ 4.72 per gallon.
Now as me how much I pay for gas.
All you non US people taking small quantities and multiplying up should know that milk done by the quart for a gallon’s worth can cost twice the price of a gallon container.
This non-US person buys milk in four litre bags. The US and Canadian dollar are close enough to par, and 4 litres is slightly more than a gallon, so it’s a wash.
We pay twice as much. And twice as much for butter. And twice as much for gas. And we just got nailed (in Ontario) with two brand new taxes: HST (a harmonization of the provincial tax and the federal tax, meaning additional taxation on previously exempt items, like gasoline, electricity, etc.) and an ECO tax which the vast majority of us are only now finding out about. It’s an additional tax now added to a large number of consumer goods to apparently help pay for their eventual disposal: fucking tax fucking grab. Fuck.
The Liberal government of Ontario is fucking raping us. I’ll start a new thread once I calm down. Tomorrow.
You probably don’t want to hear about GST still being the only tax we pay in Alberta right now, then. 
No. Grrrrrr.
Where’s my Reform Party membership card?
Tucson, Arizona wal-Mart. $1.97 for a gallon of 2%. I don’t know if it’s on sale, it’s usually that price. I haven’t compared it with Safeway or Albertson’s or other supermarkets in the area.
I’ll join the other Canadians in disbelief of the low prices in the US. I would love to get milk for $2-3/gallon!
As it is, here in the Maritimes I pay about $7 for a 4 litre jug, $8 if I get it from the gas station. I swear, I see cows every time I leave the city, it’s not like there are no dairy farms around here, why the hell is it so expensive!
A bit over $5 per gallon if non-organic, but I only buy either organic or locally produced which is about 10% more expensive.
I would not be comfortable paying less.
edit: That is actually for 4 quarts, or rather 4 litres. You can’t buy it in bigger packages unless you go to specialist stores.
There are numerous daries within 2 hours of here in VA, MD, DE and PA. I noticed that folks in Tucson and Las Vegas are paying ~ $1.50 per gallon less than I am. I’m sure there’s a buttload of dairies out there. :dubious:
It isn’t proximity to the source or transportation cost, nor do taxes amount to that much. Looks like they just charge us more because they can.
Why is that? I thought lower prices reflected government subsidy, not decreased quality.
I honestly have no idea. Usually my wife buys the groceries; when I do, I tend to put necessities (like milk) in the cart without looking at the price.
Here in the Atlanta area milk costs $1.98 this week, though $2.18 is more normal. Butter costs $2.10. Which strikes me as weird. As I understand it, having just checked at the eatwisconsincheese.com website, it takes 2 1/2 gallons of milk to make one pound of butter. Shouldn’t butter be much more expensive than milk?
I’m not a big milk drinker, but my sister is and the last time she stayed with me it around 5 to 5.50 a gallon.
No. Milk isn’t converted into butter. They use the cream that floats to the top of the tank. Anything less than whole milk has had some of the cream removed. They homogenize it after removing cream.
Cheese on the other hand uses the whole milk and you get cheese and whey. Although some whey is used by companies not making cheese, much is just waste to be spread on a field or whatever they have to do with it locally.
$14.90 for 100 pounds of milk was the Wisconsin average paid producers for June 2010. A gallon of water weighs 8.6 pounds so I’ll round milk to 9 pounds a gallon. Processors get a little more than 11 gallons for the $14.90 and remember that milk has a lot of the cream being skimmed off the top before being sold. Whole milk fat content is 3.5% and up. In 2% milk half the fat is removed and diverted to butter and the like. The price paid per hundred weight is linked to the butter fat percentage of the milk.
Until I start seeing 4-liter containers at Coop, we have no actual way of knowing whether or not that’s actually true. As it stands using the metric conversion method, a gallon of milk here in the suburbs of Stockholm costs $5.60 US.
I’m referring to how it works in the US. It does work out that way and that was a heads up to let you know how it is here and why I specified a gallon jug.
There are multiple reasons I wouldn’t want to pay less. And I don’t mind paying more. I’d accept a 50% increase in price for organic AND locally produced milk.
If something is cheap the cost is almost always externalized. That’s my main objection.
And government subsidy of agricultural products have extremely bad effects.
- US government subsidize (for example) corn
- American corn is now super cheap
- Since transportation is also subsidized, transport costs are minimal. Meaning super cheap corn produced in the US is cheaper than local corn all over the globe
- Local unsubsidized corn farmers in Colombia (for example) can not compete with super cheap corn
- Colombian farmers switch to crops that aren’t subsidized in the US and that can be exported. For example coca, for which there is a high demand in wealthy nations such as the US
- Trying to stop Colombia from exporting cocaine to the US the Government now has to spend money on other things, such as poisoning agricultural areas, chasing drug runners, killing people from coca farmers up to drug barons.
So by paying billions in subsidies to it’s domestic agricultural production the US forces foreign producers to switch to something that the US will not subsidize, preferably something with a high price and a high demand. Like cocaine.
Basically the tax money spent on agricultural subsidies also forces the government to spend unneccessary money on military operations, prisons, police enforcement, healthcare, border patrols, drug rehabilitation etc etc. To the private consumer it looks like you’re saving a buck because you get cheap corn. But you paid the tax that subsidized the corn. And you also pay the tax that is used for the war on drugs and all its consequences.
I’d rather pay $6 for a gallon of milk, than $3 for the milk, $3 for the subsidy and whatever the effects of the drugs and the war on drugs and crime is. And I don’t want to be part of forcing farmers to switch from growing food to growing poison. Or forcing the government to kill them. Or creating a huge criminal market.
The reason for checking the price of milk is so you can get the lowest cost, and thus have the remaining money to spend elsewhere.
Just because I’m always going to get it doesn’t mean I don’t need to keep track of how much I’ve already spent, so I don’t go over budget. And the humility of having to put back some stuff because I didn’t take the time and just assumed the cost–it is a pretty good motivator.
As for what I pay, I can’t find the price. I’ll report back later. But I do know what we do: we go halfsies with a friend at my dad’s work, who gets a case of 4 gallons from a wholesale place. We can usually make it through two gallons easily before any problems arise. Unfortunatly, the wholesaler does not have the price of Milk on their website, so I can’t check right now, and will have to contact my father later in the day when I know he’s up.
Having grown up and lived well over 30 years in the US, I’m well aware of how things work back home. Unfortunately here in Sweden (and, I suspect, many other places around the world that use metric) they don’t sell milk in that particular amount, so the only methods we have available are either a) convert the price of 4 liters to USD; or b) multiply the price of a liter by 3.89 and convert to USD. Your method might be more applicable if stores sold 4-liter packs of milk (something I haven’t yet encountered but won’t rule out) at an amount less than 4 times the price of a single liter, but since that doesn’t appear to happen around here the assumption of a larger amount of milk being sold at a lower price per liter than a single liter of milk is untenable.
Thing is, you’re going to be paying the subsidy tax whether you like it or no. I always see it as you might as well take advantage of it if you’re going to have to pay for it, and fight it at other times.
Collective guilt has never made rational sense to me. Rather, you know about something wrong, so you have to do something to try to stop it (How much is up to you), but you’re never actually responsible for the actions taken without your consent.