Today, the American public remains mostly on the side of US customary units. Polling from 2016 found that only 32% of Americans wanted to go metric.

The US lives in a metric gray area. It has a few laws requiring that consumer goods list both metric and US customary measures, but it still remains isolated in its US customary measures bubble ...

Known as the “Mendenhall Order,” it re-defined U.S. customary units in terms of metric units. “For example, the inch is defined now as 25.4 mm exactly,” Hillger says.

I was at the supermarket recently when I took note of something my eyes had passed thousands of times before. The cans of my favorite sodas were 12 ounces, while the bottles were 2 liters.