More gripes about the Metric system, decades after Ottawa decided we should adopt it

It’s hard to believe it is already three years since we started a minor hornet’s next talking about the Metric System in Canada…

People are still reading it. Here is a Comment from last week…

Thanks for this well-researched article. I am currently tutoring a secondary school student who fell far behind in math in middle school. She is completely unfamiliar with Imperial measurements, so she is being graded this year on just metric units of measurement.

I was starting high school when the Metric Commission began implementing the metric system, so I can convert between both easily. How interesting to learn that it was the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, a great “Yankee-lover” among Canada’s prime ministers, who abolished the Metric Commission long before its task was done.

Canadians still must be vigilant in grocery stores today, as the store managers often fail to reprogram the cash registers correctly when meat or fresh produce are advertised on sale for $ X.00 a pound. The customer often pays the non-sale price, as all the registers are programmed in metric units, charging the original price per kilogram instead of the comparable sale price in metric.

I recently bought 2 pounds of grapes (900 grams approx.) sold at $2.00 a pound. I paid $7.98 for my 2 pounds of grapes, instead of $4.00, because the register still had them coded at the old price of $8.80/kilogram. I pointed this out to the manager, who gave me a store credit for $3.98. But it was too bad for the many other customers who bought grapes for the original price when they thought they were getting them for about half-price. My calculator is my best friend while food shopping these days.

Carol Shetler