Sorry New Yorkers, but according to the City Council, you’re overpaying for both rent and milk. Anyone charging more than $3.93 for a gallon—86% of the city’s milk sellers, from bodegas to Whole Foods—is violating the state’s milk price-gouging law.
Consumers are gouged an extra $0.40 on average.
“My little girl drinks between two and three gallons of milk a week,” said Queens Democratic Councilman Eric Gioia. “And when you’re being overcharged 40, 50 cents per gallon — I’m going to be okay, but there are a lot of families, if you’ve got a number of kids, that it can be really difficult.”
If you’re thinking “$0.40? That’s nothing!,” you’re not alone. Potential mayoral candidate and supermarket billionaire John Catsimatidis also supports gouging local business:
“The supermarket business is a dying breed in the New York area,” Catsimatidis told amNewYork. “Fifty percent of the supermarkets in New York City have gone out of business in the last 6 or 7 years because they didn’t charge enough.”
“[Speaker] Quinn should take Economics 101. It’s inexcusable that an official of the city of New York would just try to panic people.”
He’s right, you shouldn’t panic. If you see a grocer selling milk for more than $3.93 a gallon, or $2.01 per half gallon, call the state’s special anti-price-gouging hotline, at (800) 554-4501.
Report: Majority of Sellers in City Are Overcharging for Milk [The New York Sun]
Catsimatidis Sour On Quinn Milk Report [The Daily News]
(Photo: Getty)
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Wait? $2.01 is price gouging? I pay $2.15 for my homogenized and pasteurized w/o hormones. And I’ve been doing this since the eggs have gone up.
For that say price controls are a bad idea…
…why do people keep believing this? Everytime, every single time we deregulate markets, the result is a fucking disaster. How did deregulating energy work out?
Can you say Enron? Can you say rolling blackouts?
How did loosening the regulations on mortgages work out? Can you say “recession?” Can you say “more federal bailouts to come?”
And FYI, the NY law is not a price fixing law. It is an law to stop unconscionable prices on a food necessity.
Nobody is losing money on $3.93 cents per gallon of milk. Far from it.
But don’t let me stop you. Keep arguing for things that make your quality of life worse, your dollar worth less and your work hours longer. Long live Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and Amity Shales! Hooray for being convinced to argue against your own self-interest!
Oops, forgot to close out the bolding. Wish this site had an edit function…
@twophrasebark: Milk is not a necessity. It makes kids fat. Having milk in school lunch programs and available in public assistance programs isn’t because milk is good for kids; it’s included in these programs because it’s good for farmers who lobby for these things.
@opsomath: Guess What!
@twophrasebark: Finally someone said it! Most of these laws are fairly old and only regulate the prices of milk and bread. They were written to protect poor children from malnutrition. At the very least families could afford to feed their children. The fact that 86% of stores are ignoring this law is a good sign that we don’t need it anymore. The fact that it is making the news may be a sign that this is changing.
In Hawaii, there’s a store where the milk was $9.09 for 2%. The sale price on the other milk got as low as $5.15. Such a deal!
@jpx72x: When these laws were made we didn’t have year-round transcontinental shipping of produce or junk food. Milk and bread were, and for the very poor still are staples. If bunker fuel and corn prices keep going up obesity is going to start being a lot less of a problem.
okay..now for a totally off topic half baked conspiracy theory: This whole ethanol thing isn’t about energy independence, it really is about driving up food prices, but not for us, but for any state that could be considered an enemy or competitor. After all, China and most oil producing countries have no where near enough arable land, while the US, even if we had to seriously limit our use of oil based fertilizers we would still be the bread basket of the world. Its a tit for tat, “you take our oil, we’ll take you food,” brinkmanship game.
Where are these numbers comming from? I run the dairy at my grocery store (handle all orders, etc…) and we sell a 4 Litre bag of milk for $4.49 (CAD) but the bags cost us a little over 5 dollars each.
Thank you guys for highlighting the law… Because Milk prices are way inflated around th brooklyn area. It has gotten so bad that I was induced to switch to Soy milk [Vanilla
] which is way better for you. It seemed a way better choice since the prices are becoming quite similar! I have seen prices from $4.50 – $5.50 in some areas… Price Gouging .. only for those who are not aware of the law!
I can understand the economic argument. But if the law is on the books, it needs to be enforced. We shouldn’t pick and choose which laws to enforce based on the whim of who’s in power (I’m looking at you and your signing statements, W.).
So the argument should be that this law should be repealed and I might agree with that. But that’d be next to impossible right now.
@lockdog: The article says the law is only 17 years old. If it was “necessary” in the early 90s, then I imagine the people who wrote it think it’s necessary now.
@Kevin Cotter: Please excuse me while I pat myself on the back for making the exact same argument three days earlier (more or less) about the oil companies that Trent made, even down to the McDonald’s comparison. It is a good thing to think about when you hear “windfall” profits.
@taney71: Have price controls ever worked. Let the market determine the price.
I am sure many living in rent controlled NY apartments would disagree.
Laissez-faire policies work better with luxuries but not with necessities. When people have no choice but to buy the product or few alternatives exist, supply and demand economics is a tad bit difficult to rely upon. That’s why we have antitrust and collusion laws to prevent companies for setting artificially high market prices.
I am sure we were all grateful when the government stepped in and broke up Ma Bell, resulting in competition that subsequently lowered prices for all of us. The market didn’t work until government forced it to work. Comcast is the same way. Corporate bully who cannot be trusted with marketplace economics; it owns too great of a share.
If someone charges too much at their store, then people can go to another store. The government has no place telling someone how to run a business. I can’t wait ’til Ron Paul fixes nonsense like this.
@Lambasted: Yes, but then you run into the problem of just defining everything as a necessity. Truthfully, there are very few necessities, and milk probably isn’t one of them.
being lactose intollarant. I drink Lactaid milk (I absolutely hate SOy + soy has similar effects that milk does with me) and i wish i could pay 3.99 for a gallon of milk :-p
I pay 3.99 for a half gallon of milk. A gallon is something like 6 bucks and most places don’t carry it.
I agree, in theory, that laws that will not be enforced should not be passed. Absolutely true.
But the fact of the matter is that choosing what to enforce and what not to enforce is the only way enforcement agencies survive. Every police department does it, every health department does it, every school district does it, and every regulator of anything does it.
The philosophical point that it would be better to instantly repeal anything we decide we don’t need anymore is spot-on, but that isn’t what happens, and if we paused every legislative session to argue and pass those repeals and limitations, government would grind to a halt.
What happens is that unnecessary laws and edges of laws simply fall into disuse, as this law has, until someone decides to try to raise them from the dead for reasons of his own. The lack of enforcement isn’t philosophically ideal and has problems of its own as far as oversight, but going for by-the-books enforcement isn’t ideal either. It’s a zero-sum game — if they go after this more, they go after other things less. Milk-price enforcers do not materialize; they are pulled from other work.
This is not something I would support diverting any resources to, because I firmly believe it would only cause other prices to go up, and nobody would benefit. I support lots (and lots) of kinds of regulation, but I don’t think this does much for anybody.
I think most retailers that are charging more should sell off their stock, and refuse to carry the milk if they can’t charge a market price for it.
@ConsequencesIX: If someone charges too much at their store, then people can go to another store.
8 out of 9 stores are charging too much. So, what, they can go to 7 more stores until they find the one that’s following the law?
Ron Paul wouldn’t do anything about this. It’s wholly within the right of the city to have the ordinance. It’d be unconstitutional for the federal government to do something.
If you don’t like the laws of New York City, then you can go to another city.
I hope all NYC retailers rebel by refusing to sell milk — make everyone go to NJ. Price controls is not the business of government.
@Kevin Cotter: Where I live, and I suspect most places, a car is a necessity. You can’t go to work, medical or other appointments, grocery shopping, etc. without one. Try applying for a job, or interviewing for one and bring up the fact that you have to catch a bus – which are few and far between here. And if one is within striking distance of paying off a car, or actually having paid off a good and reliable vehicle, it doesn’t make much sense to “trade down” to a beater with a new set of payments and/or higher maintenance bills just so one can look poorer to avoid criticisms from people like you. I’m guessing either you have never walked a mile in he shoes of the working poor, or you have a very inflated view of yourself and the obstacles you overcame.
@Maztec:
1 gallon = 16 cups, so 2-3 gallons is about 2.5*16, or 40 cups. Figure a tall glass of milk (2 cups) in the morning, and a cup of milk in cereal, then another glass after school and one during dinner. That’s 7 cups of milk a day. That’s almost half a gallon right there.
2-3 gallons a week really isn’t that much, especially if the parents drink some, or use some in cooking.
Sure, lots of people say drinking milk is bad for you, but there are lots that disagree.
@Michael Belisle:
“Ron Paul wouldn’t do anything about this. It’s wholly within the right of the city to have the ordinance. It’d be unconstitutional for the federal government to do something.
If you don’t like the laws of New York City, then you can go to another city. “
Ron Paul wouldn’t do anything about it, other than to recommend that NY move away from price controls, unless he moved to NY and became mayor. Then he’d work to eliminate price controls on everything.
@Lambasted:
Actually, the price controls in NY don’t really work. Sure, many renters are really low rent, but it also means they can’t move without seeing a huge increase. Are the landlords taxes kept to a low too or do their expenses go up? Rent control also makes it a less attractive area to build new rental apartments, which means finding an apartment in a rent controlled neighborhood is near impossible.
@twophrasebark:
“…why do people keep believing this? Everytime, every single time we deregulate markets, the result is a fucking disaster. How did deregulating energy work out?”
Hardly. Enron itself is a good example of what SHOULD happen to a badly run company that commits fraud. Sure, the investors and employees lost out, but that happens to any business that goes bankrupt. Should we regulate grocery stores and pizza places so that they don’t go out of business too?
The problem isn’t deregulation, it’s corporatism.
@sodden: sadly, Ron Paul can’t be mayor of every city in the country. He’s running for president and he believes in the rights of states to set their own laws.
I don’t think a city with the density and population of New York City could function if it was ran by libertarians. It works out to about 1000 square feet of land per resident. What you do in your 2 centiacres definitely affects the people around you. If you take out all the rules, then organized crime, for example, will enforce their own.
If the city wants to control expenses, perhaps its time consider a new rent stabilization law; we can do without milk, we can’t do without affordable housing.
@NoStyle: “If they have price gouging laws that cover milk, why not gas?”
Because the dairy farmer lobbyists have far less power than the oil and petroleum lobbyists.
People shouldn’t be drinking that processed garbage, anyway. Only raw milk is good for us.
@sodden: Enron is just one example of the continuing disaster of energy deregulation. And your argument is strangely circular.
We deregulated the mortgage industry: Bear Stearns, Countrywide and a million homeowners have gone belly up and you don’t want to include the deregulation as the cause? That is EXACTLY the cause.