Remember the milkman

Delivery, old is new, and a mental cue. Also, 7 other things worth your time.

Change is hard, and right now we're all going through a lot of change. Maybe that's why I liked this small story so much.

It's about Doug Wade Jr., the CEO of Wade's Dairy, based in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It’s a true family business going back well over a century, and Wade has worked there forever.

He recalled recently what it was like tagging along on delivery runs with the company’s milkmen when he was a kid back in the 1960s. Almost every house on every street was a customer, he told The Wall Street Journal ($). But there were no refrigerated trucks, just a step van filled with bottles.

No seatbelts -- heck, not even a proper seat. “You sat on a milk crate," he said. "You just bounced around the road. Every bump you hit, it was just clink clink clink.”

It sounds like ancient history, and in fact Wade's Dairy shut down its home delivery service in 1992, as milk became cheaper at grocery stores, and as dual-income families became the norm. (People weren't home to get their deliveries…