228 THE MARKETING OF WHOLE MILK 



retailed at stores and milk stations, (3) bottled milk 

 wholesaled to hotels, restaurants, arid stores, and (4) bulk 

 milk at wholesale to hotels, restaurants, manufacturers 

 of various products requiring milk, such as bakeries, candy 

 makers, etc. 



The various city prices may be thought of as being 

 built up from the basic wholesale prices at which milk is 

 purchased from producers, since, as pointed out in the 

 preceding section, it is at this earlier stage that the various 

 demands for milk make themselves effective in drawing 

 milk into the particular channels in which the demand 

 at the time happens to be strongest. 



In each of the various classes of city trade, howevfeTj 

 prices are determined, to a large extent, by separate and 

 interacting forces. Thus wholesale prices of bulk milk 

 may be entirely out of line apparently with wholesale 

 prices of bottled milk, whereas retail prices are at other 

 times apparently out of line. In Table XLII are shown 

 prices paid to producers in June and December of 1919 

 in each of ten cities. Column 2 gives the retail price to 

 the family trade, and column 3 the margin which the 

 dealers took above prices which they paid producers. It 

 will be noticed that the June margins vary from 5.50 cents 

 per quart to 8.34 cents per quart, and the December mar- 

 gins vary from 4.45 cents to 7.12 cents. 



In columns 4 and 5 are prices paid by the stores and 

 other wholesale purchasers of bottled milk and the dealers' 

 margins on this class of trade. These margins are from 

 I to 2 cents lower than the margin on the retail trade, 

 since both the retail and the wholesale bottled prices are 

 usually given in whole cents, the latter prices being usu- 

 ally I or 2 cents below the retail delivered prices. Again 

 there is no uniformity in the margins, which in this case 



