wrote in message
ups.com...
Ed Huntress wrote:
In a free market, many more products in the supermarket
would be labeled just in liters and grams.

Not if they wanted to sell them.

I do not understand the grammar of that response. The FPLA forbids
Proctor and Gamble from selling metric-only products.



we'll finish converting to metrics, but not until it pays to do so.

Your analysis is one of the best I have seen but it omits the legal
barriers to metrication. Voluntary conversion is forbidden by law.
Companies like Proctor and Gamble want to offer metric-only products
right now. But the FPLA and other laws make metric-only products
illegal in the US.

Well, you said "in a free market." I think that US consumers would be wary
of metric-only volumes and weights in many categories of products. So it
would be necessary to have both metric and Imperial measures printed on
bottles and containers to avoid losing those customers who wanted to know
how many ounces or pints, etc., they were buying.

In most categories that wouldn't be a high percentage. But it would be a
measurable loss of market share, and that always hurts.

Even though 2 liters is slightly more volume than 2 quarts, people I've
talked to believe that the liter-based volumes are a ploy to sell less for
more. So printing the Imperial volumes under the liter volumes probably
helps Coke and Pepsi avoid the skepticism. I don't think, in other words,
that Coke and Pepsi would print only the liters on the bottles if they were
allowed to do so.

--
Ed Huntress