Why Milk Crates Are Almost Too Perfect For Storing Stuff
By: Ernie Smith
Tags: Politics, Design, Business, Law, History

But why? Well, simply put, the crates are of a particularly high quality, and aren’t cheap to make. And as a result, when crates go out of circulation, they cost a lot of money to replace — at scale, millions per year — and that, unwittingly, affects the price of milk.

“We don’t want to see anyone go to jail or pay a $300 fine,” said Bill Cramsey, the owner of a dairy distributor, in a 1987 article in The (Allentown, Pennsylvania) Morning Call. “All we want is our milk crates back.”

The Pennsylvania law was first, but other states followed suit — among them Virginia, where it’s a fourth-degree misdemeanor to buy, sell, or dispose of a milk crate, and Florida, where it’s a first-degree misdemeanor to possess one.

The severity of these laws compared to the offense, of course, leave a lot of room for abuse. One such case in Florida, as highlighted by Reason in 2016, involved a man who found a milk crate on the side of the road, attached it to his bike, and was arrested for it. The Polk County Sheriff’s Office literally suggested that the person was dangerous because he was using a milk crate.

“Deputies are actually out there proactively looking for things that don’t look right; looking for suspicious things. If they see somebody riding a bicycle at 10 o’clock at night they may have a conversation with them,” spokeswoman Carrie Horstman said of the arrest to WFLA. “They are looking for people who are doing even the smallest crime, because, what we’ve learned is, those who will go out and steal a milk crate, for example, are the same people who are probably breaking into cars, breaking into your house.”

As you might imagine, given a comment like that, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to milk crate-related arrests in Florida and possibly elsewhere. The Miami New Times reported last year that during a three-year period, 49 people in the Miami area went to jail for possessing dairy cases, while another 58 faced jail time for using an unauthorized shopping cart.

There’s a clear separation between someone who is simply sitting on a crate and someone who is trying to sell crushed milk crates as raw HDPE on the black market. But the law, for the most part, makes no real distinction.

In an era when police brutality is a real danger and its effects can turn into front-page news in an instant, laws for the possession of a milk crate seem out of whack for the scope of the crime and creates dangerous situations for people who may not even be aware that possessing a milk crate is even illegal.

For contrast, I’d like to highlight how milk crate use was discussed around the time bans started going into place for an audience that gets a lot of use out of milk crates. From the 1987 Morning Call piece:

College students are one of the larger groups suspected of milk-crate thefts, according to distributors. Many students use the crates as furniture in their dorms, or for easy moving purposes. The college theory was proven last month when students at Edinboro University in Edinboro, Erie County, heard rumors that campus officials were going to search their rooms for the crates. Students were seen throwing them out windows, tossing them into showers and stuffing them into storage closets to conceal them even though the raid never took place.

To put it another way, the idea of legislation barring this practice initially had an air of novelty to it, with the target of the legislation seemingly being college students who didn’t have the benefit of a nearby IKEA. It was already a weird law, and to a degree its existence was played for laughs, because milk crate theft was seen as something of a victimless crime, where the costs to society were felt somewhat indirectly.

But now, it’s become a regulation that seems increasingly out of step with modern-day realities, one that could potentially endanger the public because it offers an excuse for police departments to arrest someone who otherwise isn’t doing anything wrong.

There are situations where milk crates may be used in crimes — such as in the theft of tires from vehicles — but it genuinely raises the case that the laws should be rewritten in a way where they can’t be abused.

One potential side effect of the fact that possessing milk crates was made illegal in some parts of the U.S. is that a lot of storage designs in the modern day were clearly inspired by it.

Whether you walk into a superstore like Target, check out a dollar store, or simply do your shopping on Amazon, you can find lots of products that clearly would not exist if the dairy industry had not figured out the perfect vessel for storing stuff in a stackable format.

(How can they get away with it? Simple: For one thing, the milk crates generally aren’t the same as the ones actual milk suppliers use; but even if they were, they don’t have the branding of a dairy supplier on the side — a requirement for most of the laws banning the possession of milk crates.)

If you go to an IKEA or a similar style-heavy furniture store, you may not necessarily see milk crates out everywhere, but you probably see their influence all over the place, in the cube-driven designs of many of the products sold as modern organizers. You have to imagine a lot of dorm-room furniture in the modern day borrows from the ’80s milk crate aesthetic.

The dairy industry unwittingly kicked off an important trend in storage, even as its superpowers seemed to do everything in their power to discourage the trend from taking off.

I’m not saying it would’ve been in their best interest to do so, but one has to wonder what might have happened if the industry decided to embrace the unexpected success of the creation.

Currently, the dairy industry is at loggerheads with the makers of plant-based alternatives to its most popular product, with soy, almond, rice, and (more recently) oat milks proving popular. They’re trying to push the Food & Drug Administration to stop letting the producers of plant-based milks call their products “milk,” and might successfully make their case.

If that happens, I wonder if these companies producing milk analogues should separate themselves from the dairy industry and actively give away their containers to the public as a marketing tactic. If they can’t sell “milk,” they might as well give away the crates, which are more popular than the dairy industry ever gave consumers credit for, and earn a little consumer goodwill in the process.

Can’t join ’em? Beat ’em.