GRASSROOTS movements to cut out middlemen have been on the increase since Greece’s debt crisis exposed the country’s Achilles heel — a bureaucratic system which stifles innovation and encourages corruption.

    One of the most successful is based in Larissa, near the demi-God’s legendary birthplace. The town’s new vending machines, have, on a small scale, solved a problem Greece’s leaders and their international backers have tried and failed to tackle.

    They dispense not snacks or soda, but milk, supporting farmers while undercutting prices that have defied economic logic to remain some of the highest in the European Union.

    Greeks, whose average incomes fell by 30 percent since the crisis hit in late 2009, have been flooding in — bringing their own bottles or buying plastic or glass ones from the machines.

    “People were waiting 20 to 30 minutes in line to buy milk!” said Constantine Gougoulias, 37, general manager of the dairy cooperative behind the initiative, describing the response on the day the machines were set up. “We were telling them, ‘Hold on, we need to fill the machines first.’”

    Today ThesGala or “Want Milk?” has expanded to 14 vending machine outlets in Larissa and plans to double the network in and around the central city over the next year.

    Sales from the blue and white machines account for a small fraction of the cooperative’s milk output, but they show how crisis has encouraged entrepreneurship where self-interest has a social twist in a country where bureaucracy stifles development.

    (SD-Agencies)