DIYbanter - View Single Post

Ed Huntress

"Mark Rand" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 21 Sep 2007 04:24:14 -0700, wrote:

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.

I assume that there is no problem at all with selling 1kg of sugar that is
also labeled as 2lb 3 1/4oz etc. That gets the punter used to the size of
metric quantities and makes the change to metric only labeling less
traumatic.Doesn't have to be instantaneous. 40 years is probably not
unreasonable to let people grow up with the ideas, and it's already
happening.

Yes to the first part, and yes to the second part, to a modest degree. I
think that most consumers only care if they're shopping for value in terms
of cost-per-weight or cost-per-volume. There are some of those, and it
varies by category.

However, we're used to seeing metric measures now, as long as the Imperial
measures are somewhere on the container.

--
Ed Huntress