> That's not the only problem Dean Foods has faced. Walmart (WMT), which was one of Dean Food's biggest customers, dropped them last year after building its own dairy plant.
Burying the lead here... I’m sure that had an outsized impact on them.
Walmart wasn't the first company to do this, many of the big grocers are in housing milk production, or so I heard from someone who works at Walmart HQ.
> The trouble started in 1930s with "marketing order" regulations. Those rules set minimum prices that dairy processors must pay to dairy farmers in 10 regions of the country. Today, about two–thirds of milk is produced under federal marketing orders, and most of the rest is produced under similar state schemes such as California's.
> Marketing orders limit competition, because entrepreneurs are not allowed to supply milk at less than the government prices.
> On top of marketing orders, Congress added a dairy price–support program in 1949. This program helps to keep prices high by guaranteeing that the government will purchase any amount of cheese, butter, and dry milk from processors at a set minimum price.
> The Government Accountability Office compared U.S. dairy prices to world prices over the period 1998 to 2004. It found that U.S. prices for butter averaged twice the world price, cheese prices were about 50 percent higher, and dry milk prices were 24 percent or more higher.
On the assumption that insourcing your milk production effectively exempts you from the price floor on outsourced milk, what's surprising is that there are grocers that don't do this.
Really, just, not. You can spell it either way; if you're writing for (or as) an editor, or just for the affectation of knowing editor jargon, "lede"; if in conversational English, "lead".
(I write "lede" all the time, and it is totally an affectation).
I notice you tend to use semicolons more than anyone else I know. Is that also an affectation? I mean, are you sometimes reformulating your thoughts in order to avail yourself to the opportunity of using a semicolon? Because me, rarely does a thought come to me in a way which would be best communicated with the usage of a semicolon, but maybe that's just me and my thinking style.
Semicolon usage could be an affectation or preference; it is generally used in place of a regular conjunction like "but" or "and".
There isn't any usage that I can think of where it would be the only "correct" way to write something; it's stronger than a comma but weaker than a period.
(I don't ever use semicolons normally. Was just trying to show some examples.)
Nope. I'm just not a very good writer. How I know that's not an affectation is that I can't remember ever once thinking about using a semicolon; they just happen.
Burying the lead here... I’m sure that had an outsized impact on them.