I'd suspect they rejected the metric system because it would have cost money to change everything over. The argument would presumably have gone something like "we can't have the federal government imposing a cost on the citizens / corporations".
Exactly. It had nothing to do with "too much math" -- I think everyone appreciates metric uses less math, and we all learn it in school anyways for science classes.
It's the cost of change. Replacing every speed limit sign, spending decades where half the cookbooks you own use oven temperatures in °F and half use °C. Years of confusion where someone says they were going 60 and you have to ask if they mean mph or kph.
Not to mention changing the size of every milk container, and so forth...
I'm not sure I buy that excuse. For packaged goods and so on, you don't have to change any sizes of things. Just pick a date and change to a different package design. So nothing in your factory that produces 1 gallon milk jugs has to change except the graphic design needs to start saying 3.8L Milk instead of 1gal Milk. At that point, you can transition to change the physical size of things whenever it is convenient.
For cars, most of them in the US already show mph and kph, so the switch should be easy. Leave old signs alone, but whenever new signs get built, build them in both units for a few years (65mph / 105kph) allowing you to gradually transition to metric.
Repeat for everything else. You can gradually make the switch. Heck, some products (like soda and bullets) are already in liters and millimeters.
I agree with the OOP. We refuse to even take the first steps to switch because of good ol stereotypical American paranoia: "If we switch to metric, all the companies will use it to make everything smaller and rip us off!" as if shrinkflation wasn't already a thing.
> Leave old signs alone, but whenever new signs get built, build them in both units for a few years (65mph / 105kph) allowing you to gradually transition to metric.
Road signs last around a decade. So you're talking 10 years to replace with dual-unit signs (which are more confusing) and then another 10 years to replace again with metric-only signs.
Is it worth it? Is it really that important to change driving speeds to metric? What's the benefit?
And how does it help to say "hey can you pick up 3.8L of milk?" If packaging sizes don't change then we'll still call it a gallon and we won't have "converted" at all.
Conversion is a massive, confusing, expensive effort, and it's reasonable to wonder whether it's actually worth it.
> And how does it help to say "hey can you pick up 3.8L of milk?" If packaging sizes don't change then we'll still call it a gallon and we won't have "converted" at all.
I'm with you on everything but this. The imperial system allows retailers (and/or consumer good manufacturers) to take consumers for a giant ride. I have lived in both USA & EU, and in the USA I just give up entirely on comparing goods in a supermarket. With the metric system there's nowhere to hide, and I can compare all products, whether you use ml or l, mg or g or kg. In the USA different manufacturers will use any odd denominator they can come up with and after about two weeks of normalizing fractions every time I went shopping, I gave up.
Even the little tags supermarkets add to try and help you, aren't enough. Many shops use a different denominator, and even a single shop will vary internally. Something as simple as comparing the price of bacon becomes a middle school math problem.
I hate corporate greed, I am partial to pointless mental exercise like math, and I am very stubborn. I don't want to speak for other people but something tells me I'm not the only one who has given up on this battle. Retail customers have more power in the metric system.
For everything else though yes I agree who cares. Except °F which is actually better. :)
> The imperial system allows retailers (and/or consumer good manufacturers) to take consumers for a giant ride.
That's a really interesting point. However, ultimately I actually don't think it has anything to do with imperial vs. metric, but just consumer culture.
In Europe, when you order a drink the menu tells you how many centiliters it is. In the US, it's just small-medium-large-XL, which every location defines however they want. And in the US, the difficulty in comparison doesn't have anything to do with imperial units -- it's that one package of tomatoes is defined by volume while another is by weight, and the loose bell peppers are priced per pepper while the packaged ones are priced per weight, and so forth.
Switching to metric wouldn't change any of that.
That's a problem that can seemingly only be addressed by legislation -- e.g. that strawberries and tomatoes must be sold by weight not volume, or that selling produce by the item must also accurately list the average item weight.
Your post reminds me of the additional problem of "The Serving" which is a unit of measurement entirely conjured up by the food manufacturer to serve as the denominator when listing required nutritional information.
A normal 50g bowl of your sugary breakfast cereal too unhealthy? Just define a "serving" as 20g and cut all your bad numbers by 2/5! Problem solved! Is your bag of chips full of salt? Just invent a "Serving Size" of three chips and you don't have to draw attention to yourself on the nutrition label.
Letting companies define their own units of measurement seems to be a totally preventable regulatory mistake.
Indeed, it's something the EU prevented. There are regulations on what the standard serving size is, and other regulations specifying how the item must be priced -- so all the milk says "per litre" under the price tag in the supermarket, even the fancy one in a tiny bottle.
There were also preferred size regulations, which was meant to make it even easier. Breand could only be sold in multiples of 400g. I think this was relaxed, but it's still present for some things. A standard bottle of wine is always 75cL, for example.
I was thinking 50+50 years, but ok 10+10 years is even better. I mean, if you do it gradually enough, the cost approaches zero, so is it worth "almost zero" to have a standard measurement system across the globe? Maybe?
Nothing stops us from enacting generous legislation mandating the switch to metric by the year 2125 or something. You'd have to have intermediate milestones of course, or everyone would just do nothing and wait until 2124 and then complain endlessly about how the transition is so costly and we can't possibly do it in a year, and so on.
But this is the USA, where we can't seem to do anything that takes longer than a quarter, and our entire country's major priorities change every 4 or 8 years.
There UK still used miles per hour for speed limits, and I’ve debated how we may change with my partner.
I think the battle here is now lost - if you want to use km/h a sufficiently advanced modern car will show you the current speed limit and convert from imperial to metric for you. In the ten-to-twenty years a full change would take to complete we’ll proabably have cars which are close to self driving, so who cares what value they use for speed limits?
But for everything else - please do look to the UK as an example. We converted in the 1970s and it’s still a bit messy today, but it’s mostly worked.
Beer at a pub/bar is mostly sold in pints, but to sell in litres is legal. Bottles of beer are often 330 or 500 ml.
Wine is sold in millilitres, as are spirits.
Basic milk is in pint sized containers (sizes in litres are shown). ‘Fancy’ milk is often sold directly in litres.
You get the occasional container which is a weird size - like golden syrup is still sold in a 454g (1 lb) container.
Ovens can be dual calibrated, and English language recipes often already will give both metric and imperial units for readers in the UK, AU, NZ, CA, etc.
When cooking - if I find an American recipe with unconverted values I will just use Google (“what’s 6oz in grams?’), etc. In fact a bigger problem for me is that American recipes tend to use volumetric units (e.g. 4 cups of flour) where I’m used to weight (e.g. 500g of sugar).
It's the cost of change, and also the fact that the people you need to convince to switch don't benefit. If you're an adult in the US, you already know the conversions you need to do everyday tasks (e.g. 12 inches to a foot, etc). You also have calculators absolutely everywhere to do the math for you, so it isn't like you benefit from being able to do it in your head more easily. So, if we switched to metric most of the country would have to incur significant costs, and reap no benefits. That's never going to fly.
>"we can't have the federal government imposing a cost on the citizens / corporations"
same kind of moronic non-argument for why the US gov can't invest in healthcare, or housing, or education; none of these things are "costs" and all of them are very high ROI investments, but Americanoids are incapable of thinking more than one fiscal quarter into the future
