polybore

Callan - The Same Trick Twice (22nd April 1970). Callan confronts Surtees (Richard Hurndall).

In 1995, 45% of British milk was delivered to the doorstep before seven in the morning by a milkman in an electric float. In 2026, it is 3%. The milkman has been effectively abolished inside one human generation. The supermarket walked in, undercut the cost by a few pence per pint, and the daily ritual of British household life, glass bottles clinking on the step at half past six, was gone by the time the children of 1995 had finished secondary school. The cost to the customer was a few pence per pint. The cost to the system was, in rough order: the glass bottle that was washed and reused hundreds of times, replaced with a plastic bottle that is used once and recycled imperfectly. The local dairy that supplied one town, replaced with a national processor that supplies half the country. The milk that arrived four hours after milking, replaced with milk that arrived three days after milking after a journey of 200 miles. The conversation on the doorstep, replaced with a self-checkout beep. The milkman himself, incidentally, had the lowest recorded rate of heart disease of any male occupation in Britain. He walked approximately 12 miles a day, finished work by 10am, and ate a cooked breakfast. He has been replaced, in the same delivery role, by a zero-hours Amazon Flex driver sitting in a Ford Transit. A small piece of British daily infrastructure was quietly demolished. Nobody was consulted. The milk is still being produced. It is just being produced further away, transported further, kept in plastic, and sold at a different margin, by a different business, to a customer who never sees who milked the cow. The milkman knew your name. The self-checkout does not.