The containers are usually bottles, cans, or kegs; sometimes bulk tanks are used for high-volume customers.

Those companies that had granted deep discounts to veterans' hospitals and other high-volume customers would have to do the same for Medicaid, with a 25 percent limit at first.

Normally, private phone companies would provide the lucrative intrastate service to such high-volume customers as state agencies and universities.

Today's announcement marks a new stage in the competition for high-volume customers.

Morean implemented automated equipment and processes with the aim of attracting high-volume customers.

However, the only people who pay those undiscounted rates, he notes, are low-volume callers who were implicitly subsidized by high-volume customers under regulation.

Since then, AT&T has raised its base prices repeatedly, giving it more room to pay for discounts and new promotions to high-volume customers.

But the key to success is capturing the high-volume customers.

U.P.S. has sewn up most of the high-volume commercial customers, like department stores and mail-order businesses.

It also enables railways to compete more effectively with road and internal waterway transport systems, However, unit trains are economical only for high-volume customers.