PRICES AND QUALITY OF CREAMERY BUTTER. 5 



territory are now basing their price agreements upon the Chicago 

 quotations, because of the immense volume of daily receipts in that 

 city and the fact that it is the chief center for reshipments to " out- 

 of-town trade." 



The other important wholesale markets for creamery butter are 

 New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston. The quotations 

 issued in those cities serve not only as bases for settlements of mar- 

 ket transactions within the territory supplied from these jobbing 

 centers, but they are also the bases for price agreements between 

 Avholesale receivers and the creameries which ship to them. Al- 

 though many of the creameries in the New England States no 

 longer sell a large portion of their output to wholesale butter mer- 

 chants in Boston, the custom of basing their selling prices on the 

 Boston quotations still prevails, 



RELATION OF WHOLESALE PRICE QUOTATIONS TO STAND- 

 ARDS AND GRADES. 



QUALITY STANDARDS. 



To permit comparisons of market prices in different cities and to 

 facilitate trading between different sections of the country, the vari- 

 ous wholesale trade organizations in the chief wholesale butter mar- 

 kets of the United States have adopted grades and standards for 

 butter. In wholesale market transactions butter generally is classified 

 as " Creamery," " Dairy," " Ladles," and " Process," according to the 

 method of manufacture; and "the trade" also recog*nizes different 

 " grades " of creamery butter, such as " Higher scoring lots," " Ex- 

 tras," " Extra Firsts," " Firsts," and " Seconds," according to differ- 

 ences in the quality of various lots. The lack of uniform standards 

 for the various " official grades " applying to certain wholesale mar- 

 ket transactions is shown in Table 1. 



Figure 2 presents a comparison of the average monthly wholesale 

 price quotations for Extras in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, 

 Chicago, Elgin, and San Francisco. It is evident that the prices, in 

 the areas where production exceeds local consumption, differ from 

 the prices in eastern market centers by approximately the costs of 

 transportation. The experience of creamery men, however, has shown 

 that the trade demands of different cities vary to such an extent that 

 the standards of quality in the different markets are not actually 

 the same, even when the accepted standards of different trade organi- 

 zations, as shown in Table 1, are ostensibh^ alike. Hence the current 

 market reports are not exact guides as to the prevailing wholesale 

 prices of like grades of butter in different cities. 



