From Mr. Free Market comes this observation:
As I pointed out to him in my reply, it goes deeper than that. In the old days, people used to leave their back doors open so the deliveryman could check the supplies of milk, butter and eggs in the fridge, and refill as needed.
I leave it to everyone’s imagination as to what would happen should such a service be reintroduced in Britishland today. (Or, for that matter, in any urban center in the U.S.A.)
I can’t remember if the Divco milk trucks that our milkman used had refrigeration, but it looks like there is none on that truck at all.
The Brits don’t really need that much refrigeration — ambient temperature at early-morning delivery time would be between 40F in summer and 30F in winter (and colder in higher elevations and Scotland).
I spent a couple of years over there; my father was in the Air Force, stationed at Upper Heyford. It was the morning of Christmas ’85, and it was looking to be (at least for a bit) a white one. I opened the front door to bring the milk in and found the foil caps had been pushed off the bottle tops as the milk had started to freeze. I think it was the cream floating on top that froze first (we bought unhomogenized), which enabled a weak joke about having gotten “ice cream” with that day’s delivery. 🙂
A certain large retail chain is looking at doing that here. The dual bottle neck is getting people to let strangers come in to stock their larder and how much they get sued for at the first theft/murder/rape.
Son and daughter-in-law had a house in Oakland, CA built in the ’40’s where next to the rear entry door was a pass-through kind of arrangement: a door on the inside of the house and a matching door on the outside, with shelves in between.
Milkman, etc could put their wares on the shelves via the outside door, and the householder could retrieve them via the inside door. Access to the shelves, no access to the house.
But then again, Oakland was a lot different in those days.