US going metric?

"sammacel" wrote in message
om...
"Don Howe" wrote in message
news:HqmKb.969728$9l5.470462@pd7tw2no...

Teaching kids won't do it. You need laws to force manufacturers to
change their products to metric or really to produce separate product
lines to support all the old stuff for years. Tremendous expense
(think hundreds of billions) for no great benefit and certainly a
significant amount of chaos and shortages. Not politically feasible
and why mess with a system that works since all will slowly go metric
as needed?

The UK has proved that. We've been teaching kids metric since the 70's. It
hasn't really worked. While we are largely metricated now, there are still
grocers etc selling goods by the pound. It isn't kids who are doing the
buying, in my area it's mostly older people who use those shops (I guess
younger folks go to the out of town supermarkets). They've been used to
using imperial all their lives so don't want to change, so the shop doesn't
change. By the time the kids who learn metric grow old enough to be
customers of these shops, they've been forced into using imerial for so long
that they don't want to change either!

Personally I think a change to a total metric system should be forced
through, it will cause more confusion, initially, but once everyone gets
used to it, nobody will care.