Could one assume that these products are marketed in North America and that the Mexican colloquial usage was used in the Spanish version. ----- Original Message ----- From: Mike Millet To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 1:45 PM Subject: [USMA:37941] Metric at the hardware store
While in Home Depot the other day I amused myself by reading the labels. The first thing I noticed was that nearly everything was done in English French and Spanish. The second thing I noticed was that all metric dimensions only showed up in the Spanish and French portions of whatever was being described (shelves, tiles, cabinets etc). But the thing that was most disturbing to me was the fact that every dimension I saw on every piece of hardware from nails to large shelving systems was in centimeters. Not only that, but was often in decimal form of centimeters using a comma ( i.e. 37,5 cm instead of 37.5cm). As a plus everything was at least marked in SI but that odd little comma showed up everywhere. On normal gooods like paper towel rolls or Rubbermaid containers it's always been with a decimal point but everything in Home Depot that was used for construction was in centimeters measured out to the tenth of a centimeter and separated by a comma. So the question I have is this. How did the centimeter become so dominant in American metrication? I now see Pat's point about using millimeters as it gets rid of a decimal place and somehow looks better as well. The comma and I don't get along when talking numbers because a comma to me says "pause here because a new word or idea starts" whereas a period to me just means "Stop here" and the decimal point is a sort of mental hard stop to me. As far as the centimeters dominance I have noticed that it's integrated into the American lexicon thoroughly. You often hear someone saying they came within a centimeter of doing something or having something usually bad done to them :). I seem to recall that the NIST and other government agencies have followed the rule of 1000 when metricating meaning they probably use millimeters. Still, if the metric only label law gets passed I'll bet you money that the building industry in this country ends up standardizing on the centimeter simply because of the domance I saw in the store Mike -- "The boy is dangerous, they all sense it why can't you?"
