Decades of study prove that consumers would rather be ripped off by down-sizing than by raised prices.
Of course, as I whined earlier, switching to metric offers some fantastic opportunities for those kinds of shenanagins. The U.K. switch from gallons to liters for petrol in the '80s is a prime example.
The US Military is metric IIRC. As is the USMC.
Which just goes to prove my point: people by sugar by the bag, not by the pound. “I’ll take one of those bags that’s about the size of a half a loaf of bread, rather than one of those huge bags over there.”
Hmm. Perhaps the recent reappearance of 5-lb bags is to prime us for the introduction of 2-kilo bags. At the same price per bag, of course.
Microbreweries typically serve ~20 (US) oz pints when asking for a pint. No place to get an imperial gallon, though.
I don’t understand the whole discussion of the metric system in the USA. We’re nearly as metric as Canada, except our street signs say MPH. What would a government decree that we’re metric do? Change the street signs. That’s it. Nothing else would change. Not without violating a lot of free speech rights that we hold dear.
[ul]
[li]You can’t broadcast or report temperatures in °F. (Why not? It’s my right).[/li][li]You can no longer put US weights or volumes on packages (ditto).[/li][li]You can no longer publish cookbooks with °F (ditto ditto).[/li][/ul]
Look, I work with metric units every day. I prefer them (except Newtons; I’m a lbs-F guy). It doesn’t matter what the government says. We will always use what we want to use. And that’s demonstrated in nominally metric countries even today. Damn, I live in China and the televisions are still sold in Inches. Plumbing is NPT!
Numbers and units are just numbers and units. Smart people will get by. Why not let the dumb people be happy?
Do you mean that the UK is mostly metric, or mostly not metric? The former is true, but it seems as though you might be arguing the latter.
The exceptions to metric measures in the UK are essentially:
[ul]
[li]Miles[/li][li]Pints of milk[/li][li]Pints of beer[/li][/ul]
Sure, some people still talk about their weight in stones or whatever - just like some people still call 50 pence ‘ten bob’. That won’t change until those people die and are replaced by people who have learned the metric system at school, and nothing else.
The Marine Corps not being part of the military?
Powers &8^]
Most consumers. That’s hardly comforting to those of us who prefer the opposite (or don’t consider a raised price to be a rip-off in the first place).
Powers &8^]
I think you’re underestimating how much of this comes from the government. Okay, not cookbooks, but temperatures, absolutely. If the National Weather Service switches to Celsius, would the Weather Channel be far behind? Maybe, maybe not, but people would slowly start to understand Celsius temperatures.
Also, the federal government, as the largest purchaser of many items, has a great indirect control over what the marketplace provides. If the government starts mandating metric measurements for certain items, manufacturers may find it more efficient to just switch all production over.
Powers &8^]
It’s not quite so simple. The government can encourage shifting to metric units. How? You know how foodstuffs are typically labeled in dual units: US (metric). Instead, label them metric (US). Furthermore, package in even metric unit sizes. See my example above about sugar packaging. Sell 2 kilo bags of sugar, that happen to be labeled: 2kg (4.4 lb). Do the same for canned food, boxed food, etc.
What about fastener sizes? Encourage the use of metric fasteners instead of US customary sizes. Except that runs into complications with heritage hardware already out there.
True story: the last great push for metric, the government mandated NASA use metric units. NASA started requiring metric units on their drawings. Except all of the tooling and the heritage system (Shuttle) was designed and built using US sized tools, fasteners, etc. They discovered it was not practical. So they stopped forcing the metric units on drawings. But I have hardware systems with some portion of their drawings defined with Metric units, the rest in Inches. Yea!
In 1982, Ronald Reagan disbanded the U.S. Metric Board, which was set up in 1975 to help the U.S. convert to the metric system.
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/laws/usmb.html
The irony is that his first career was in film, a field in which metric is the standard unit of measurement (16mm, 35mm, etc.).
They pull both tricks: first reducing the size without changing the price, then going back to the big size, printing “25% MORE” prominently on the label, distracting you from the 35% price increase.
But yeah, I want a 1/2 gal ice cream back! Two liters would be even better.
Metric is not a unit; it’s a system of units. But even so, film length is measured in feet even while its width is measured in millimeters. So it’s not quite that clear cut, nor that ironic.
Powers &8^]
Well… here in mainland Europe we’ve been doing the metric thing for longer and there are still people using old measurement terminology who weren’t even around when it was still current.
One of the main obstacles some Americans seem to have is this idea that objects are somehow naturally in feet, inches, yards etc and converting this to metric measures makes for problems. This is a very confused perspective:smack:.
If you have an old door frame, built using imperial measures, that needs a replacement door and you measure it out metrically and the result has an odd number of millimetres on the end, this is not an argument against metric measuring; it just means that the older system’s round numbers don’t match metric’s round numbers.
The 100x60 cm sheet of glass in my door comes out at odd measures if you measure it with an inch rule, but of course, it was conceived under metric measures! Pieces of 2x4 timber obviously made sense when measuring differently; that a change to metric would render a usefully-sized piece of wood marginally smaller or larger for the purposes of round figures is not a problem, it is a standards alteration.
I haven’t been to the UK yet, but I think it would have surprised me. It does seem that the conversion went considerably farther in Canada, and they’re right next door to us.
When I was in Europe I noticed how the metric system can be, and is, used in a way that is more comfortable and familiar to those who grew up with imperial units. You can buy a pound of meat in a German store, although said pound is 500g instead of 16 ounces avoirdupois. A metric pint of half a liter works well, especially for beer drinkers who enjoy the bonus swallows. OTOH when you’re used to 12-oz. bottles as opposed to those 333cl bottles, you miss that last swallow of beer every time with the latter. It’s like the last step that isn’t there.
In general, though, I think the conversion could have been presented to the public a lot more effectively than it was.
Conservative governments in the UK and Canada, around the same time, also decided to defund conversion efforts, or at least let them atrophy. I think Canada was considerably farther along in the process when that happened there.