Americans Used to Get Milk Delivered Every Morning, So Why Did That Stop?

Every morning before dawn, a stranger carried fresh milk to almost every American doorstep. Then, in a single generation, he vanished. In the early 1950s more than half of America's milk was delivered to homes. By 2005 it was four tenths of one percent. The story of the American milkman: why milk had to arrive every day in a world without refrigerators, how the glass bottle, the milk wagon and pasteurization built the trade, a morning on the route, and the forces that ended it: the electric refrigerator, the supermarket, the car and the suburb, the paper carton and the cost of a longer and longer route. Plus the small comeback of home delivery, and what we lost when the shelf replaced the man at the door. Collab partners in the America Before group: @SurvivingOldAmerica and @AmericaWithoutIt Chapters 0:00 The five a.m. street 1:56 A world without a refrigerator 3:04 The bottle, the wagon and the germ 4:30 A morning on the route 6:59 The peak 7:34 The machine in the kitchen 9:09 Supermarkets, cars and suburbs 11:25 Paper beats glass 12:53 What the milkman cost 14:32 The numbers fall 16:35 The comeback 19:15 What replaced him, and what we lost Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture home-delivery figures (as cited); Smithsonian Magazine (Matt Novak, 2012); census-era refrigerator estimates. Archive films (Prelinger Archives / U.S. government / company films via Internet Archive, public domain): All for Safety / Dairy Farm / At Home in the Water / Dairy Farm Buy An Electric Refrigerator Dairy Industry, The In The Suburbs Proof Parade, The (Frigidaire) Shopping Can Be Fun: A New Concept in Merchandising Small Milk Plant Operation Someone's In the Kitchen Sorting, Checking and Packing Grocery Orders in Self-Serve Store This Is the Dairy Industry [Amateur Film: Ice Harvest, Pocono Manor, 1919] [Frigidaire Imperial Line] [Industrial footage, unedited: Borden's dairy] Photographs (public domain): Library of Congress, New York Public Library, DPLA, MOHAI, Tacoma Public Library and other archives, via Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons (attribution): "1948 Divco delivery truck at 2015 Shenandoah AACA meet 1of6" by CZmarlin, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons "1950 Divco 11 Milk Truck" by F. D. Richards from Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons "1959 Divco Milk Truck at the North Carolina Transportation M" by David Wilson, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons "2020-04-22 18 53 51 South Mountain Creamery milk delivery tr" by Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons "2020-04-22 18 53 58 South Mountain Creamery milk delivery tr" by Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons "Abbotts Glass Milk Bottles 1920s-1960s" by Bruce C. Cooper, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons "Milk Inspection, Minneapolis Health Department" by City of Minneapolis Archives, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons "Milk delivery door - exterior" by Downtowngal, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons "Milk delivery door - interior" by Downtowngal, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons "Milk home delivery truck" by Ron Clausen, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons "MonitorTopFridgeHarvard" by Infrogmation, CC BY 2.5, Wikimedia Commons "Richfield MN-washburn Ave" by unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons "Supermarket interior, 1955" by Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons "Two milk gallons in refrigerator door.agr" by ArnoldReinhold, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons Archive film and photographs: Prelinger Archives, U.S. National Archives, Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons (public domain unless noted). Full credits above. Why It Stopped, the american habits that quietly disappeared. #history #americanhistory #documentary #WhyItStopped