Ring around the caller.

• Position: Coin Telephones Inc. produces telephones for use in jails

It's about as close as the state's two largest grocery chains have come to having a real food fight - and it was all over milk and moolah.

In early April, Charlotte-based Harris Teeter supermarkets bought a 250,000-gallon-a-month dairy in High Point from Borden Inc. Rival Food Lion of Salisbury, which had been supplying its 240 stores with milk bottled by the High Point plant, switched to a Pet Inc. plant in Charlotte. Partly as a result, 48 of 218 workers were laid off in High Point.

"We had a feeling somebody's nose might get out of joint," says Rush Dickson, Harris Teeter's senior vice president of marketing.

New York City-based Borden, producer of Borden and Meadow Gold dairy products, has slowly been shifting its emphasis toward packaged goods such as Creamette pasta, Wise snacks, Bama jams, Elmer's adhesives and Krazy Glue.

"The Borden High Point plant became available, and we saw the opportunity to purchase production capacity at far less than it would cost to expand," Dickson says.

Why are supermarkets moving into milk when Borden is getting out? For one thing, they can do it better, Dickson says.

Grocers need to have a consistent source of raw milk close by and to be able to get it on the shelves at a low price, he says. "We can match the customer base up to the supply because we can deliver a captive audience."

But supermarkets need the dairies more than they want them. Shoppers will switch stores to save a few cents a gallon on milk, Dickson says. "If one competitor moves down [in price], everybody moves down. You cannot even entertain the notion of profiting at those price points."

Let's face it. There's no such thing...