Jul 1, 2008 7:30 pm US/Eastern
Milk Prices Set To Jump Over $4 Per Gallon
Cost Jumps 70 Cents Since May; Threshold At $4.37
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
You may be paying near-record prices for a gallon of milk. Starting Tuesday, retailers were allowed to charge more than $4 per gallon.
As CBS station WCBS-TV in New York City found out, many are blaming high gas prices for the latest milk price increase.
If you love milk, get ready to pay even more. The threshold price for milk is the maximum amount retailers are allowed to charge. On Monday, that price went from $3.93 a gallon, to $4.37. It's gone up more than 70 cents since May.
At 2-year-old Jade's house, her family drinks at least three gallons a week.
"It's going to be hard, but we're going to have to manage," grandmother Griselle Mueller said. "What can we do?"
Another person WCBS-TV spoke with said it's a sign of the times.
"Everything goes up and everybody's wages go down it seems like. That's the way it is," said Don Catrone of Astoria. "You got to deal with it."
Henry Beyer is a milk distributor for Tuscan Dairy, who just had major lay-offs and cutbacks to fight the rising cost of producing milk. He says it now costs more than $500 to fill each truck with diesel, and those trucks get only about 5 miles a gallon.
He says the stores are not the bad guys.
"It's not the store's fault. Stores are just passing on the cost," Beyer said. "The increase in cost is based on gasoline, energy, packaging, processing."
The threshold milk prices are based on how much the federal government pays farmers for milk, and that price is way up.
So what happens next? The folks who come up with the threshold milk prices say it's a rollercoaster, so there's no telling what will happen but the people at Tuscan say if gas prices keep going up so will the prices for milk.
We hit the record threshold milk price last July at $4.54. It stayed that high for four months.
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