Since its adoption during the 1980s, metric
conversion has been a disaster for British consumers. In any market place, the
goal of weights and measures is to provide consumers with information on the
products they wish to buy. Obviously, such information must be in terms that
they relate to and understand. On this basis alone, metric fails to deliver
since every national or consumer
survey conducted on the matter shows that most consumers
prefer impreial units. This is despite twenty years of metric education
which has failed to convert the British public to the metric
system.
Consumers' declining awareness of quantity, combined with the
physical repackaging of foods and goods along metric lines, has deprived
consumers of the means of judging value and provided endless opportunities for
"hidden" price increases, whereby packaged quantities are rounded downwards.
This is the Great Metric Rip-Off.
Worse, the quantity reductions that occur as a result of metric conversion are
not "one off" occurances. Metric, by its abstract
nature, promotes conditions in which product reduction can take
place at any time without consumers having a means of detection.
Despite widespread opposition to metric among consumers, neither
mainstream consumer organisations nor the
government's own Department of Consumer Affairs, represent consumers' views or
interests on this issue. Similarly, trading
standards offices, rather than carrying out their traditional
function of protecting customers from short measure, are being used to police
the enforcement of metric, even when this is clearly contrary to the interests
of consumers.