Underthinking the Price of Milk

 So tonight for some unknown reason I decided to watch Campbell Live. Campbell Live is the tabloid of NZ TV, the guy picks a crusade and harps on about it for months at a time. Last year it was Brian Tamaki.

I am sorry BISHOP Brian Tamaki

The thing is John Campbell never actually has a story he just whines about inane things and because he is so excited people think he is actually telling them something. His interview tactic involves him yelling his opinion over the guest he has on, how this guy remains on TV as a respected interviewer/journalist/presenter is beyond me.

"And I would say to you, Oi Campbell NO, you are a hopeless presenter"

Anyway John's latest crusade is against the price of milk in this country. Now I understand that Milk is expensive, but there is no rort going on, no one is making more than they should off the product. On his own story tonight, we got told that the $4.80 2L bottle of milk can be split into the following components.

$1.39 for the Farmer.

A good thing too, Tractors aren't cheap.

$1.36 for Fonterra

How Campbell sees Andrew Ferrier (CEO Fonterra)

$1.73 for the Supermarket

No wonder this little man is so happy.

$0.72 in GST

"So, we take 0.72 cents every time someone buys 2L of Milk, that's awesome"

I mean this breakdown seems pretty legitimate to me, yet John Campbell claims we are paying too much for milk, where exactly does he see the cuts to the price coming in?
The Farmer? Out of that $1.39, he need to buy his cows, service his machinery, feed his cows, pay off debt he probably has from the land, irrigate, and pay his Carbon tax in 2012. I am not sure he can shave too much off that $1.39.

Forget the tractor if we cut the costs there.

How bout Fonterra surely they don't need that whole $1.36, those greedy bastards! No its not like thy have to go pick up the milk from all around the country and with the cost of petrol these days that is not cheap, process the milk, package the milk, then distribute the milk.

With the price of Petrol, that $1.36 probably goes into gas money.

How about the supermarkets? Well they need to store the milk, they need to pay the guy to put the milk on the shelf, they have power bills. I mean sure most of the costs aren't entirely reliant on milk sales, so there probably could be some cuts here, but this isn't who John decided to attack, no the evil Fonterra, and farmers they are the greedy ones. But even if the supermarket could cut costs, it would it would probably bring the cost of milk down by $0.10, which probably isn't going to make a huge difference to household budgets.

With all his savings on Milk, Maurice could finally afford to live large.

The GST component, is another area I guess for cuts, but things get rather complicated when you start having variable GST on different products, so I will avoid discussing this.
The other thing that gets me, is John is unhappy paying $4.80  for this product, that has so much go into it, where the processing is expensive. But I bet he is happy enough paying $2.50 for a 750 ml bottle of water.

This is all that is required to get water to put in bottle

Seriously, turning on a tap is slightly less complex than farming animals, to produce milk, but John Campbell has no issues with the mark up on this product does he?
 John Campbell wears shoes and clothes, that are probably manufactured by some poor Chinese kid for about $2 at cost, but yet sold to the consumer for prices well into the hundreds of dollars, why is there no stink being kicked up about this markup? Some people are getting very rich off these products.

Put it this way, I don't think Fashion people are concerned about the price of milk.

 I seriously wonder about people in this country sometimes, they seem to live in a fantasy land, where milk comes from nowhere, with no work required to produce it, so can't understand why isn't given away for free. 

"What do you mean manufacturing and distribution costs?"