Consumer Affairs Links from this page: Consumer surveys and polls The failure of metric education The Great Metric Rip-Off Metric's abstract nature The role of consumer organisations Trading standards offices 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 neither think in metric, nor want it. This is despite twenty years of metric education which has failed spectacularly 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 producers with endless opportunities for "hidden" price increases, whereby packaged quantities are rounded downwards. This is the Great Metric Rip-Off (this is a long page, so please wait a few moments for it to download). 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. Thus, the use of metric makes the prospect of reduced measure a permanent feature of the consumer economy. Not surprisingly, most supermarkets support metric, yet they quite content to use imperial units when it suits them. What is especially remarkable is that, given the 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, are being used to police the enforcement of metric, even when this is clearly contrary to the interests of consumers. It is though these bodies were set up to oppose consumers. John Keiner ist hoffnungsloser versklavt als derjenige, der irrt�mlich glaubt frei zu sein. There are none more hopelessly enslaved then those who falsely believe they are free! Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
