The less expensive store-brand-label milk is at the back of the store where the big walk-in coolers are.
Supermarkets have varying strategies for stuff, including cold items. The supermarkets around me put ice cream in either a center aisle or the second to last aisle, in the front of the store. The "smarter" store from a data standpoint has pint ice cream in an end cap next to the florist to nab women. Milk is always back corner.
If they can figure out how to maintain the cold chain for ice cream, I'm sure milk would be easier to move around.
It not that it's impossible to maintain the cold chain with other placements, it's that there is a cost (including that imposed by floor traffic) in doing so. Putting it someplace where a large volume walk-in cooler can be directly loaded from a truck and the display stocked from that without employee floor traffic across the store reduces the costs (labor, losses, and otherwise) of selling milk.
My wife never buys me flowers :-(
But I am a sucker for a pint of ice cream :-)
Then again, I guess if you're going to target for milk you're probably doing it wrong...
I don't know if this is their logic, but it makes sense.
Additionally, any time you see milk that is shelf stable (doesn't require refrigeration until opened) its been UHT pasteurized and packed in special aseptic packaging.
And, yes, I've noticed that, for some reason, organic milk tends to be UHT pasteurized more often than non-organic milk.
If your sentiment were true, most heavily weighted expendables would all be located in the back simply because of labor. Labor is cheap when you can increase revenue from every potential customer with basic layout adjustments.
They are. At least in almost every grocery store I've been in. The milk coolers are almost invariably against the back wall, accessible from the stockroom (which itself has the loading dock), as is the butcher / meat department. Both of those departments are probably getting daily deliveries, and it's of stuff that needs to be kept cold, has a short shelf life, and in the case of milk specifically, it needs to be stocked from the back of the shelves so that the oldest items get bought first (i.e. it's FIFO not FILO). It's a real pain to do this if you can't get to the back of the cooler.
Bread, however, is generally in its own aisle because it's not stocked by the store. Vendors (the bakeries) send their own delivery/logistics people in to stock it, so the stores don't really care about how easy it is, and those vendors also pull expired or near-expired items back off.
Produce, despite being expendable and delicate, tends to be towards the front because it's very high-margin for the store and also requires a lot of continual employee attention (and it generally has dedicated employees who just do that). It's admittedly been a long time since I worked in a grocery store, but back in the day in the pecking order of grocery-store floor workers, the produce guys were sort of at the top of the heap. (Although maybe that was because they could hook you up with the "damaged" fruit...)
If it were more profitable for the store to stock milk in the front they would - I agree. But the reasoning isn't delivery layout when they manufacture their own layout.
Either way, I thought this was an interesting take on it http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/23/334076398/episo...