glass bottle doorstep: 85-110p
4-pint plastic works out ~40-45p/pint
Advanced options
The honest comparison is against the 4-pint plastic bottle (the cheapest milk in the shop at ~40-45p/pint), not the single supermarket pint: against that, doorstep glass is roughly double. What you're buying: reusable glass (each bottle averages 25+ round trips), doorstep delivery before breakfast, keeping a declining trade alive, and for many people simply the clink of nostalgia: all real, none free. Milk-and-more platforms add veg, bread, juice at similar premiums: the basket creeps.
What The Milk Delivery Calculator Works Out
- Delivery premium: (doorstep pint minus shop pint) x pints a week x 52. Glass on the step at 85p to 110p against a supermarket pint at about 65p puts the eight-pint family's premium at GBP 100 to GBP 200 a year, a figure most subscribers have never computed.
- What the premium buys: the glass loop (25 plus round trips a bottle against single-use plastic), a pre-dawn round's labour and the survival of a trade that supermarket logistics nearly deleted. All real, none free; the calculator prices it without prejudging it.
- Trimming it: the hybrid most households land on, doorstep for the daily pints and 4-pinters for baking weeks, plus the warning that juice and sourdough at delivery prices turn a GBP 150 milk decision into a GBP 400 grocery one.
- Cheapest 4-pint bottle price (advanced): the honest baseline. The supermarket 4-pinter works out at 40p to 45p a pint, so doorstep glass is roughly double the cheapest milk in Britain, not the 30% the single-pint comparison suggests.
- Other items and their premium (advanced): what you spend a week on juice, bread, eggs and veg from the round and roughly how much dearer they are than the shop (typically 20% to 40%), giving the whole-basket premium.
- Weeks a year (advanced): deliveries paused for holidays reduce the annual figures; most rounds make pausing easy online.
- Hybrid saving (advanced): how much you save by moving some weekly pints to 4-pinters while keeping the rest on the doorstep for the habit and the glass.
- Plastic avoided (advanced): the 4-pint plastic bottles you do not buy in a year, against the handful of glass bottles doing the same job across their trips. The environmental case for glass is stronger than plastic on reuse counts and weaker than folk assumption once transport weight enters the sums.
- Per litre (advanced): both prices per litre (a pint is 568ml) for comparison with the price labels on the shelf.