[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on 2002-08-19 17:08 UTC:
> On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 11:49:00 +0100, you wrote:
> >Grocery shops: In England, there is still dual labeling of beer/cider/
> >milk (because the use of pints is still allowed for these three product
> >groups), and for the per-mass prices of not-prepackaged food (because
> >the change to kg was only 1.5 years ago in this area), but I see the
> >latter fading away more and more.
> >
> >Markus
> 
> Yesterday I went for a drive through the Cotswolds. We stopped in
> Chipping Camden, a magnet for tourists, full of little cottages and
> narrow streets, and the sort of place you don't expect to find many
> Labour voters. Yet a quick visit to a couple of high-street
> 'mini-markets' showed all loose produce showing prices 'per kg' -
> ONLY. Not a lb anywhere!

That's to be expected. They have to manually label products, they get
their prices per kg from their suppliers, so the pound only shows up in
customer displays, and adding it is merely inconvenient work. Where I
still see dual labeling in per-pound prices, it is only in large
supermarkets where a computer inventory system prints the price label
automatically. There, it would cost effort to remove the few lines of
code to add the pound prices, so they haven't done it yet. I suspect, it
will happen for sure the next time they have to make some change on the
layout of these price labels. Fair enough ...

The only aspect in grocery shop metrication that surprises me is that
milk in plastic containers is still sold in pints. These containers
would be very easy to replace, and I had though the exception for milk
was only for when it is delivered in glass bottles. What's the full
story behind milk metrication in the UK?

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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