The Price of Milk

As my wife has not been at all well I was asked by her to enter for the first time the portals of what transpired to be a hellhole known as Woolworths in Deloraine to do the weekly shopping.

All good deeds deserve some form of reward. In this particular case my interest was aroused by the price of milk.

I have more than 1000 calves and cows living at my Bentley Mootel here in Chudleigh.

They stay as my guests their owner paying for Bed and Breakfast for two years for which in exchange I feed and look after them using the services of a full time employee my excellent and reliable farm Manager.

I have had no complaints from these delightful guests and they seem to a cow both contented and well fed.

They come as calves and leave after a visit from the Ashgrove Bulls to calve; by then they are easy to handle and know their expensive place in the commercial world as the future producers of clean and green grass fed pure Tasmanian milk.

On my first ever visit to Woolworths the price of the following for purposes of comparison was noted on a busy Easter Thursday in 2015:

Red Bull lemonade not milk $10.39 a litre

Pepsi Cola $6.32 a litre.

Mount Franklin Sparkling water $6.33 a litre.

Mount Franklin Still water $4.08 a litre.

Ashgrove Green full cream milk which is utterly delicious purchased for $2.12 a litre.

Pura milk $1.50 a litre.

Permeate milk. $1.25 a litre.

On this evidence over costing I suggest that the owners and shareholders of Woolworths are using their monopoly and power to destroy and/or constrain our Tasmanian milk industry by selling our Tasmanian milk as a loss leader in their store.

In China fresh milk from Tasmania is over $11 a litre and yet it sells – having been flown to its destination in one of the poorer countries in the world – to be sold as a luxury product.

Wake up brain-dead customers of Woolworths, you are being conned. There is something dreadfully wrong going on here and it has nothing, absolutely nothing – as the cows would say – to do with their Greens.

• Philip Cocker, in Comments As a family of six our food meals are large. We made the decision last year to no longer shop at Coles or Woolworths and apart from one visit have not shopped there for best part of a year. It has been revealing shopping at Tasmanian owned stores and a bulk Tasmanian supermarket in Moonah. We will tally it up but at this stage we believe it to be no more expensive and no lesser product range. The one time we did go back it struck us how much processed crap filled the shelves in comparison to the local stores.