Buy European

It's also that imperial uses body measurements for basic stuff. Your foot is about a foot long, so you can pace off distances. One yard is about the length from your collarbone to the opposite wrist, so I can roughly measure fabric quickly. From your fingertip to the crook of your thumb is about five inches, and the knuckles on your fingers are about an inch apart.

I used to do industrial embroidery at an immigrant-owned shop, and the boss switched from metric to imperial because measuring a couple inches with your fingers is faster than finding a meter stick and measuring centimeters exactly. When you've got multiple inches in your margin for error, there is no need for the precision of metric, and the speed of imperial just makes more sense.

I have seen US companies try, but it is so slow.

We did customs tooling. In the 80s 90s it was inch sizing and inch components. Late 90s still inch tooling but Metric components, and so drawings would have REAM for .236 Dowel ( instead of 6mm) LOL In mid 2000s tooling was metric sized as long as it was close to a purchasable inch size from the steel foundary. So block would be 608mm wide, to order a 24" block.

So 2025 mostly you can see places working full metric.

Then there are places I have worked recently that still use Fractional inch on projects and then wonder why assembly problems arise. Like design intent is 8.541 and maybe clearance to adjacent part has to be .039". Drawing has 8 9/16 + 1/32, so not only is sizing wrong compared to mating part, the fractional inch means dude uses a tape measure by eye, rather than a 3 place decimal measure tool. It's such a mess.

Americans are really falling behind these day in all the metrics 😂

One of the most annoying things in the world are American websites that claim to sell internationally but they only offer USD and all provided measurements are in American imperial.

Right up there with online stores that only have boxes for "state" and "zip code" even if the selected country doesn't use those.

We actually use both. Imperial is easier to break into 3rds, but can still break down into other bases easily without any irrational numbers. Metric is more useful for science, but my mom who does landscaping prefers Imperial for her designs because it’s not stuck in base-10.

Europeans are the ones who refuse to learn more than one system lol

Thank you for your efforts!

So, from my perspective, your experience gives me the exact opposite view. The fact is: no one is stopping us. Anyone in American can use metric any time they want. We use Imperial a significant amount of time because it's useful. Feet and inches are related to body parts. Kilometers are too small for our giant country. I design surgical tools, and I use metric. I design buildings, and I use feet and inches.

I don't really think it's slowing us down to have more than one system.

Uh, I'm pretty sure you divide mm/25.4 to get inches.

You can but there are real examples where mixing units results in failure. NASA lost a 125 million dollar mars probe in 1999 because JPL and NASA use metric but Lockheed Martin added acceleration data in American imperial units.

It might be a circle jerk but it is also best practice to use a standard system and there's really only one holdout on not using that system. I say this as an American who wishes people would just use metric because it's just easier unless you just fucking love fractions of an inch.

anyone can do whatever on their own, but if it affects anyone else than that one person its not just that one person's business. I cant see the insistence of using imperial system as anything else than america has used it in the past, and therefore its american system and because america is the best it must be the best system to use and to claim anything else is to hate america.

Squared centimeters for a volume measurement?

This could’ve been dealt with decades ago if people weren’t afraid of change.

How many British thermal units does it take to heat up a slug of water 1 degree Celsius?