absolutely delighted that this simplifies the situation
Having grown up here I do regard this as batshit, and yet also at the same time obvious and correct.
I’m pretty sure this is why it’s totally normal for even the most official sources to measure everything in comparisons - things on the news are always the size of football pitches, busses end to end, and areas the size of Wales. There’s no guarantee the audience will all understand the same measurements, because different generations use different combinations of measuring systems.
The systems also intersect more than this suggests - all greengrocers sell in lbs but price in kgs for example. Car efficiency is measured in miles per gallon but fuel is sold in litres. It’s totally normal for the same thing to be measured using two different methods depending on context.
Also if you’re buying alcohol commercially some people still use hogsheads which are fun because the volume of a hogshead is different for every alcohol because it’s based on medieval tax law rather than an actual measuring system. A beer hogshead is way more litres than a wine hogshead is more than a sherry hogshead. Also land is acres and hectares, but buildings are square feet unless they’re offices in which case they’re Square meters. Hope that’s totally clear and not confusing at all!
….my takeaway here is that we use our measurements more consistently than people in the UK, but neither of us can get our shit together regarding volume and we’re both really weird about alcohol and milk. (Literally I started thinking about how to explain US alcohol sizes and I think my head exploded.)
Also the “soda comes in liters” thing is a relic of a very brief time when we almost ended up on the metric system and then didn’t. It stuck, even though kilometers didn’t.
