Millennials like myself have no memory of the milkman. It is strange to think such a person even existed. Someone who visited your home regularly in order to maintain a healthy stock of just one type of beverage. Someone who collected your containers so that they could be transported back to the milk factory and reused. Not only delivering to the front door but more often than not the back of the home, or your "milk box" or "milk locker". Today such a business model sounds more like a radical Silicon Valley startup than it does a 1950s staple.
 Thats right half a century ago home delivery was good enough that people had milk lockers (delivery infrastructure) to handle fresh food built into the home. Why don't we have this now? Missed deliveries are a huge hot button issue in e-commerce, so is ultimate convenience. With grocery about to become the next massive disruption as refrigerated pickup points rise in popularity, and online ordering platforms for grocery leaders evolve, I have to wonder, where did the milkman go? Who killed him? And will he be seen again shortly in the future?
In a nut shell, for those who didn't know him, the milkman took your order via a handwritten note that you placed in the top of your used milk bottles that were left on the doorstep for collection, usually inside a metal milk box. Upon receiving your empties (and your order) the milkman would bring back the bottles for cleaning. He would fill his truck with anything from milk to butter, eggs, orange juice, and even your dry cleaning, and bring it back to your home in a systematic and effortless fashion. Doing it all on the cheap such that your average 1950's household could afford it. Upon arrival children would fight for who got the fresh solid cream that rose to the top (this was a real treat). The milk bottles were sealed by a paper wax peel off system so they could be inexpensively reused. You would leave payment for your milkman often in the form of a check inside the same milk box. It all worked seamlessly and he was a fixture for the neighbourhood. He even received presents on Christmas through the same milk box from happy customers.
Eventually superior supply chains prevailed and with it better access to milk which deemed the milkman unnecessary. Preservatives, large scale dairy manufacturing, long haul refrigerated transport tanks designed for milk, automobiles, better bottling at the source, better retailing at destination, better (not ice box) refrigeration in the American home, it all left the milkman vulnerable. With all his overhead in owning a truck and filling it with gasoline and washing his bottles each day, the milk man died.
But in the future the milkman is yet again wanted and in high demand because as our economies continue to evolve and grocery retail absorbs more e-commerce like functionality empowering us with better pricing, selection and ultimately convenience, the milkman is needed again. A big trend in e-commerce this year has been creativity in reorder systems like Amazon Dash a physical button in the home for reordering of commodities like detergent and diapers. This complements the idea that a neighbourhood delivery system for weekly staples is developing. Someone is needed to aggregate weekly last mile refrigerated deliveries of food, perhaps leveraging fully reusable packaging systems on fresh items, and delivering it all to residential delivery lockers ideally built into the home. Maybe it will be some time until we get here, but whomever brings the milkman back from the dead will control an important piece in grocery, a 600 billion dollar market just in the USA. It would be basic change in how we go about a large aspect of our daily lives and our consumption patterns... Amazon Fresh anyone?

Below are photos of heroic milkmen from the past:

 

Delivery lockers on old American homes