This American recently returned from a few days visiting the Ontario side of Niagara Falls (beautiful, by the way – both the Falls and Ontario!) and had the opportunity to shop in two different supermarkets, both in St. Catharines (about 10 miles west of the Falls). I was very surprised – shocked, actually – to find signs in both supermarkets, posted by the fresh produce, giving the price in dollars per pound.
Dollars per pound? In Canada?
I’ll admit that the signs also showed the price in dollars per kilo, in a smaller font, below the $/lb price. (For example, in large print it said “Cherries - 99c/lb” and below, in smaller print, “$2.18/kg”.) But I am very surprised to see pounds mentioned at all. I have a personal guess about this, but this is GQ, and I’m looking for a factual answer. Does anyone know why Canadians would post the price in dollars per pound?
Land. Out west, the farm-land is all surveyed on a system of townships, a square mile, with the subdivisions (sections and quarter sections) being neatly subdivided into acres. Hectares are never used.
Personal height and weight (as was mentioned on a Corner Gas episode) - no-one I know uses metric to refer to the height or weight of a person; we lose or gain pounds in our diets, etc.
Wine in my experience in restaurants tends to be a mixture. If you ask for some of the house wine, it’s usually offered in litres or half-litres, but if you order a glass of wine, it’s usually given in ounces on the menu.
A lot of people think in imperial units rather than kilograms/meters when it comes to everyday entities like food, people and other objects below 1 ton, even in Québec. Measurement units are largely matters of convention and habit, which can be passed down from one generation to another and take a long time to disappear if they’re good enough for people’s purposes.
Also, posting the price in pounds makes it sound cheaper.
You’ll notice that in this particular case, the marketing-savvy price (99 cents) is made to fit the imperial unit. In order to end the price with 99 cents in kilograms, they’d have to give a 10% rebate or jack up the price significantly.
Incidentally, pot is measured in metric when sold in small quantities (grams) then goes to Imperial for small dealer/big smoker quantities (ounces) and then goes back to metric (kilograms/metric tons) for big transactions.
Off the top of my head, TVs/monitors and construction materiel/tools also use the imperial system.
When we first went metric it was illegal to post the weight in pounds, but there was such a backlash that a decision was made to allow either just kilos, or both kilos and pounds. So, there will never be just pounds.
Also, it sounds like a better deal in pounds to boot.
As mentioned, we mix imperial and metric a lot. Along with the others mentioned:
Body temperature is usually in Fahrenheit.
So, is swimming pool temperature.
Golf courses are in yards.
Lumber sizes, and a lot of other building supplies.
ETA: I see MichaelEmouse beat me to some of these points.
and though the gas is measures in litres, and the highway speeds are posted in km, I think most people use miles per gallon to estimate the efficiency of their cars. That’s probably because of the proximity to the US and the fact that the US manufacturers use mpg, so their promotional materials tend to use that as well.
I am in Québec province on vacation right now and noticed that office space is leasing in units of pi[sup]2[/sup] and it took me a minute to realize that was the abbreviation in French for square feet.
In the oil and gas industry we use both acres and hectares. The provincial governments persist in using metric, so most folks are pretty good at remembering the conversion factors. (1 ha= 2.47 ac)
Freehold is still acres.
And for the engineers, it depends on the age of the actual person. The youngsters think in m3, the older folks in barrels. If you are 30ish you wind up trying to do both, depending on who you are talking to.
Except of course that mileage figures are given in miles per Imperial gallon, so they aren’t comparable to US figures. It’s kind of funny, because it’s a fair bit of computational work to figure out what you’re getting in mpg. But I’m actually hearing l/100km a lot more recently, I suspect because many new vehicles report mileage on the dash in those units.
Who are you talking to that uses Celsius for other things that use Fehrenheit for those?
The only time I hear anyone referring to body temperature in F is my parents and grandparents talking about kids/grandkids/nephews and nieces with fevers. And they all use F for everything. (Except AC here, since the thermostat is in C.) Every other time it’s come up - me, my niece’s mother (telling my parents the niece had a fever - I had to translate), doctors and nurses, etc, it’s always in C.
Pool temperature rarely comes up in my experience, but when it does, it’s the same scale as air temperature - it’d be utterly illogical to do otherwise.
The only thing I use F for is cooking, since I mostly get my recipes from my mother, or American friends, so…all F from them.
My parents - and therefore so do I - use Fahrenheit for the pool temperature but Celsius for air temperature. Don’t know why, we just do. The pool heater display is in Fahrenheit, but that’s only been installed for a few years.
We tend to cook using Fahrenheit as well; our oven defaults to 350F when we turn it on.
