THE MILK CONTRACTOR 243 



place them in the center of the territory of distribution. They are often 

 rambling structures that in many cases housed the contractors business 

 when it was small and required little machinery and have been enlarged 

 as the growth of the business required, by the purchase and addition of 

 adjoining structures and by the building of annexes. So these plants 

 are only indifferently adapted to the business. In fact, one of the things 

 that has delayed the introduction of cost accounting into the city milk 

 business has been these very plants for they necessitate the shifting of 

 employees from job to job in a way that baffled all attempts at good 

 management and accurate keeping of time. Of late years there have been 

 erected in Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, New York and other 

 cities plants that are especially designed for the city milk business. No 

 expense has been spared. Their sites are carefully chosen; they are 

 marvels of sanitary construction; contain the latest machinery for pre- 

 paring milk for delivery to the consumer and for handling it in the most 

 orderly, rapid and economical manner. The buildings contain huge 

 vats for mixing and storing the milk, machines for clarifying, pasteurizing 

 and bottling it, apparatus for making butter, cheese, milk beverages 

 and homogenized milk, repair shops, laundries, and power plants for 

 making steam and driving the machinery. There are also chemical and 

 bacteriological laboratories besides lunch rooms for the employees, rooms 

 for the drivers to use when making up their accounts, offices for the offi- 

 cials and clerical force, garages, wagon sheds, stables and smithies. To 

 one who has never visited these large city milk plants it is difficult to 

 comprehend the scale on which the business is done. What for the time 

 being will be the largest of them all is to be erected in New York City in 

 1916. It will be a six-story plant having a frontage of 252 ft. and a depth 

 of from 100 to 125 ft. The cost of the building alone will be $300,000; 

 it will have a refrigerating plant of a daily capacity of 12,000 tons and will 

 employ 125 to 150 men. In most of these large plants are stores for the 

 sale of milk and dairy products as well as of eggs which are often handled 

 as a side line by city milk dealers. Sometimes cafeterias where dairy 

 lunches are served are established. The milk business is absorptive in 

 character and some of the large dairy companies become real or virtual 

 owners of restaurants, ice-cream factories, confectionery establishments, 

 bakeries, etc. 



These huge milk plants can be supported only by the great metro- 

 politan centers but their advantages are so great that even in the smaller 

 cities similar but smaller plants have been built. A single plant may be 

 capable of handling the entire business of such places but sometimes 

 competing firms each put up a plant with the result that neither thrives. 

 More commonly the first company to build secures a monopoly of the 

 best part of the business through its ability to pasteurize the milk, give 

 it adequate cold storage and to serve the public promptly. Many boards 



