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This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.Subscribe
This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.
two words: loss leader.
same thing applies to quality x)
Yup. Very true.
I’ve observed the opposite effect. Milk at the grocery store costs over $4/gallon these days while I can still get it from the local convenience store for between $2.50 and $3.40. I think I have to echo kiwano here.
And the milk is always in the back of the store.
What Nathon said. While 7-11 is perhaps not consistently cheaper than conventional grocery stores for milk, it is generally on par or slightly better.
What’s really weird is when you can get a gallon of milk for less than a gallon of gas…
@BJ: why is that weird? I would guess more effort goes into locating and extracting oil, refining it, distributing it worldwide (etc.) for gasoline.
Milk can be ‘manufactured’ locally, and takes a lot less processing.
What’s strange to me is how a gallon of gas was ever cheaper, considering what goes into its creation.
So maybe we should find a way to utilize the milk by learning to use it as fuel for a combustion engine?
@Spencer:
I live in dairy farm country. The farmers here would LOVE you if you managed that!
Where I live now, this holds true. Where I went to law school, I could usually save 50 cents or so by buying milk at the 7-Eleven. I think this was due to national pricing. 7-Eleven charges the same for 4 litres of milk anywhere in Canada, but milk costs more in Dominion in Ontario than it does in Safeway in Alberta. Just a guess, though.
You can bet your sweet acidophilus on this one.
For us it’s cheaper to buy milk from the convenient store at the gas station— about $2 cheaper than at the supermarket, weirdly enough.
What bugs ME is that it’s so much cheaper to get soda. I know that milk actually is worth stuff, but the fact that such unhealthy stuff is so much cheaper bugs me!
The inverse is true in Boston. Even the supermarket-brand milk is more expansive than the good stuff sold at the corner convenience.
@Neil:
Is the supermarket-brand any less good than the “good stuff” (presumably a broader-reaching brand)? That line of reasoning has always eluded me. Unless you’re into some sort of hippy organic free-range non-caffeinated unpasteurized or somesuch, commercial cow milk is commercial cow milk, isn’t it?
@brandon and @bj:
What’s really weird is when price of water/gallon is more expensive than milk or gas. What does that tell us about the power of marketing? Or about our gullibility?
Back when I lived in Pennsylvania, there were signs outside many convience stores saying “milk at state minimum prices”. While it rather annoys me that there *is* a state minimum price on milk, apparenly you couldn’t get milk cheaper then a Turkey Hill anywhere in Pennsylvania.
its generally true in orlando…but not at ALDI. has anyone ever shopped there? its awesome IMO
@deadlytoque: It depends where in Ontario and where in Alberta. I come from dairy country in Ontario and from frontier in Alberta, and I can tell you milk is far more expensive in my current neck of AB than my former neck of Ontario.
I like the new index card look! Caught my eye right away.
I gather data on this on half gallon of Organic Milk recently here’s what I found. And yes it’s generally true.
SMALL GROCERY
Organic Strauss Creamery from Star Grocery in Elmwood Berkeley
$3.89 (originally $5.39 less $1.50 returnable bottle)
Horizon Organic, Yasai Market on College
$4.29
Clover Organic, Andronico’s on Solano Ave.
$4.99
LARGE GROCERY
Organic Trader Joe’s in Oakland
$3.29
Whole Foods, Telegraph
Strauss Creamery Organic
$4.19
Clover Organic
$3.49
365 Organic
$3.29
What am I missing here? I was curious as to what comments such a fabulously funny and edgy comic website might attract, and here you are discussing –seriously, without any irony or humor– the price of milk, because it was part of a cartoon? Funny, huh?
No, really…
Actually, what I have noticed for more than 20 years is that the price of gas is often very close to the price of milk. What does THAT mean?
Think about it. And then, wonder if it is a coincidence that you can buy both at a Shell station…
Curiouser and curiouser!
@Brandon Those local farmers make only a fraction of what you pay for milk, but they have to buy fuel(and a lot of it) at full price. My dad runs a “successful” Northeastern dairy farm and that means that he breaks even, or makes a couple thousand in profit over the course of a year. Seriously. The price of milk should be higher than the price of gas.
I would suppose that’s economics of scale?