Milk delivery an udder treat; appreciate it while you can

You go out of town for a couple of weeks and what do you find in the mountain of junk mail on your desk?

An ominous letter. From your dairy.

Dear Dedicated Customer, it began.

Uh-oh, I thought. Here comes a price hike.

And I was right. But the most disturbing part of the Yoder Dairies form letter dated Sept. 1 wasn't about price. It was a worrisome admission that customers were scrapping their home delivery.

We are losing customers at a tremendous rate due to the economy, warned Lisa G. Smith, Yoder's chief operating officer.

Bad news for us nostalgia nuts who love the sight of milk boxes on porches and glass bottles in our refrigerators.

I couldn't reach Smith for details on Monday. Calls from a Pilot business reporter in recent weeks have also been ignored.

This much we do know: Yoder Dairies, which has been delivering bottled milk from cute trucks to local doorsteps for almost 80 years, has tiptoed into the unthinkable: It's now offering milk in plastic gallon bottles to save money.

Unfortunately, even these plastic jugs will cost nearly twice what they do in a supermarket.

For example, a plastic gallon of milk at Harris Teeter costs $3.99; Yoder Dairies now charges $6.49 - and tacks on a $1.50 to $2.50 weekly delivery charge.

Milk purists who insist on bottles will pay $7.98 for two half-gallon glass containers.

Suddenly, home delivery of milk is looking more like a boutique business than a simple convenience for families with kids.

My sympathies lie with the milk guys. It can't be easy trying to keep a retro enterprise like dairy deliveries afloat, even when you can boast that your product is superior to the mass-marketed milk because it's free of antibiotics and growth hormones.

In the past few years, CNN, USA Today and The New York Times have all reported a slight uptick in the demand for home delivery of milk around the country. But that was before the latest jump in gas prices.

According to these reports, in 1963 about 30 percent of all milk sales were home delivery. By 2005 doorstep deliveries accounted for just less than 1 percent of sales.

That's what makes Yoder Dairies special. Against all odds, it continues to offer a service that's unavailable in most of America.

Five years ago, I wrote about a delicious milk box encounter I had with a brash New Yorker. I was hosting a neighborhood yard sale when a stranger with a Bronx accent and a wad of cash wandered up and tried to buy the Yoder Dairies box from my doorstep.

"How much do you want for it?" he demanded.

"That's my milk box," I replied.

"I know it is. I'm asking how much you want for it."

When I told him I wouldn't sell my beat-up, insulated flip-top box, because my milk was in it every Wednesday morning, he turned to his wife and guffawed.

"Where are we, Mayberry?"

I took it as a compliment. So did my neighbors. It was nice knowing that here in Hampton Roads we had something you couldn't get in Manhattan.

We still do. For now, anyway.

Pilot news researcher Maureen Watts contributed to this column.

Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net