this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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The "milkman" is a delivery person who works for milk producers. The company that produces milk still exists, the role of the milkman was just made unnecessary due to advances in commercial refrigeration - milk did not have to be delivered fresh, it could be stored and then bought on-demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_delivery
"Human greed" didn't take over to fuck over the milkman, they just didn't need a delivery person any more because milk could be stored on site safely between shipments.
I would argue it wasn't just the refrigeration, but also the suburbanization of living and the cost effectiveness of delivering the milk from the farm to the store, which (in theory) made milk cheaper. You would still need the milkmen if stores and supermarkets didn't exist. In an alternative world where we didn't invent commercial / household refrigerators, you could still buy milk from stores daily without the need of a milkmen, becaue ultra-pasteurization exists.
I guess thats the problem with analogies and I don't think either of us will get anywhere by further arguing about this one specific example.
Sure. What I mean to say is that the milkman didn't disappear as a result of corporate greed conspiring to artifically increase the price of bread or whatever. Like you said, suburbanization and the supermarkets just made it so milk delivery was no longer necessary. The alternative is to continue paying milk deliverers... because that's what they've always done, regardless of the fact that people can just pick up milk with the rest of their groceries.