Interview With A Milkman -1996- -2021- Link

And the glass shortage. That nearly killed us. Everyone wanted milk in glass, but the washing plants shut down. I was hoarding empties like gold. I had 400 bottles in my garden shed, covered in spiders.

I’m going to turn it into a greenhouse. My wife wants it gone. But I can’t scrap it. That chassis has 400,000 miles on it. It’s carried the weight of a quarter of a century of desperate, quiet, beautiful mornings.

It was the price war. Tesco started selling four pints for a quid. We were selling two pints for 90p. The letters started coming in. Little slips of paper under the bottle: “Sorry Dai, we’ve switched to the Asda.” Interview With A Milkman -1996- -2021-

I drove the float home. I parked it. I walked inside. My wife was asleep. I made a cup of tea from a teabag, not a kettle. (Milkmen drink tea cold. You learn that.)

We got richer and lonelier. In 1996, people left keys under the mat. You’d walk into their kitchen to put the milk in the fridge if it was snowing. You were a neighbor. And the glass shortage

But the rot was there. The workforce was gone. No young person wants to wake up at midnight. They want to do a milk run on an app, by car, at 10 AM. And that’s not a milk round. That’s a delivery job.

We lost the doorstep. The doorstep was the last analog handshake. The milkman was the one guy who saw your house before you woke up. He knew if your light was on at 3 AM. He knew if you’d put the bins out. He was the witness. I was hoarding empties like gold

I looked at the fee. I looked at the 42 customers I had left. All old. Most died or in homes. I realized I was delivering to 11 active houses. I was burning diesel (ironic, for an electric float—the support van) to deliver 22 pints of milk.