- PRICES AND QUALITY OF CREAMERY BUTTER. 3D 
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 peu pments 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 
~ wholesale receivers and the creameries which ship to them. AI- 
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 
s “ Creamery,” “ Dairy,” “ Ladles,” and “ Process,” according to the 
method of manufacture; and “the trade” also recognizes different 
“orades” 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 jocal 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 ostensibly alike. Hence the current 
market reports are not exact guides as to the prevailing wholesale 
prices of like grades of butter in different cities. 
