People are superstitious about math, and fearful that rounding to the nearest nickel, or dime, will result in them getting ripped off. Also, it's an admission that the government has given up on inflation.
This is the country that gave up on the metric system because it involved too much math.
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
I think it was 30 years ago. I don't think it is anymore though.
I think people just mostly stopped caring about getting rid of the penny because they use cards and apps for everything now.
On the one hand, I absolutely think we should get rid of the penny. On the other hand, I couldn't care less because I literally haven't used a coin or a bill for a single thing in years.
It's true that things have changed over the passage of time, and I think that people have also stopped caring about the metric system.
Industry has converted. CAD software lets you switch between US and metric with the flip of a switch. Things like the spacing of pins on a microchip are just arbitrary decimal numbers anyway. The car industry has standardized on metric fasteners. Most US households don't even need non metric tools any more.
A few things like building materials are still US, but once again, for industry, they're just decimal entries into a CAD program, and if they need different sizes, they can order custom sizes from the mill.
Some weird units remain, like spark plug threads, but those things are so unique that there's no reason to switch. The only use for a spark plug wrench is to loosen a spark plug.
As an amusing aside, I still use cash, because of my side occupation as a working musician. I often get paid in cash. It piles up in my house and I have to remember to use it. Also, there's an old tradition of drinking establishments letting the musicians have a free drink, so I keep some small bills in my instrument case to tip the bartender.
Sounds like you should be in club "Ditch the penny" - because you don't use cash, the only effect it will have is lower taxes (or more efficient use of what you pay now), because of how much it costs to make pennies.
There is something to being wary of rounding up. For example when you get food from a drive-through or buy groceries and they ask you to round up to the nearest dollar, with the rest of the exchange going towards a charitable cause. They do that because at scale it's enough for them to get a tax incentive for charitable donations via other people's action. I refuse to help an international corporation cheese tax law.
But for something like me handing the shawarma guy a tenner for an exchange that comes out to $9.39, it's not anything to even care about. It's a rounding error.
> They do that because at scale it's enough for them to get a tax incentive for charitable donations via other people's action. I refuse to help an international corporation cheese tax law.
This is a myth. They can’t claim this on taxes because they don’t have the associated income. To get that using your money, they’d have to claim your donation as income and pay taxes on it, making moot any tax savings (and committing fraud against you to boot).
What they do use your money for is marketing. All the money goes to the charity but they get to say things like “Our program raised a gazillion dollars for those in need.” Which has the effect of positive associations of a giving company which hasn’t actually given.
The corp is acting as a collection agent on behalf of the charity, they don't get to deduct it as a charitable donation. Even if they did, they would have to then count the money as income, which would offset any tax deduction they would get, giving the corp 0 net tax benefit.
...Though they may get some publicity benefit from it, which is why I don't go out of my way to donate using corps as a proxy. If its a small amount that I may not otherwise make, for a good cause, sure. But for my more deliberate giving, I would avoid corp proxies. So I don't give through my employer (unless they are offering to match it with their own funds).
I assume your "kr" example is the Danish kroner here? If yes, for others, the current FX rates is 6.79 DKK to USD. So 0.25 DKK is about 0.0368 USD, or less than 5 cents in US.
> This is the country that gave up on the metric system because it involved too much math.
You say laziness, I say efficiency. More math than necessary is always too much math. It will always be more important to divide things by halves and thirds than by halves and fifths. I would apologize to the French for that, but I'm not going to apologize for always preferring multiples of sixty to multiples of fifty, to a people who count by twenties. If you don't count in decimal, you don't get to be judgemental.
We should have the $0.1 and $0.5 coins and everything should be rounded to that.
There's no reason to have $0.01 or even $0.05 precision. The value of the dollar, these days, has inflated to the point where there's simply no practical difference between $0.01 and $0.03 or $0.08 in everyday life, when dealing with cash transactions.
You could certainly track $0.01 in digital account tracking, but the coin is silly.
And -- with payment processing fees, places dealing with cash or card processing would still see less cost in "rounding down" than paying for card processing.
Prices in America are wired. Bought a beer yesterday waiting for the train. Claimed it was $7, actual price $7.62 (which Amex coincidently converted to exactly £6.00)
If I’d paid in cash I’d have to pay with at least a 2 cent coin (and likely need a 1 or 3 in change), despite the nice round number
Until America changes to advertise things at the actual price rather than a partial price, I don’t see how getting rid of 1 cent coins works.
It'd cost $7.6 if you pay in cash and $7.62173451123 if you pay via a card?
(and, if I were to pass the "small change" bill, I'd, by fiat, make it so that it'd still be "$7.6" even if it was $7.68 -- and the vendors would still come out ahead because the $0.08 lost from rounding down is much less than the $0.23 in card processing fees that comes with a 3% surcharge from your payment processors.)
Does the UK include VAT in all listed prices? I don't recall it working that way in continental Europe, and it certainly doesn't work that way in Canada with our equivalent (nor in the US, as you discovered).
That said, advertised prices are commonly not "round" in the first place. In Canada, we simply round the figure on the bill when paying cash.
UK and EU law requires advertised prices to include all taxes.
The most common exception is things aimed at business buyers, who won't pay tax -- so the Dell consumer website shows laptops prices including tax, and the business site shows them without, but labelled as such.
It means if I buy for business from a consumer site, and I'm logged in with my business account, I see 'ugly' prices like 5119.20, as the marketing-friendly number of 6,399.00 is chosen including tax.
Yes, prices advertised to consumers must include VAT. UK advertising laws mandate that the price must include all non-optional taxes, fees, etc. Prices advertised exclusively to businesses can exclude VAT.
