Quantifying the Cost of Not Metricating and Metricating

The page aims to quantify the cost of not metricating and metricating.

If you've got examples of things that are going to cost (on both sides), please add them. If you've got numbers for the cost of one of the items please add them with a citation to the research (also feel free to make estimates as long as you supply numbers for those estimates so they can be researched and adjusted as necessary).

Cost of Not Metricating

• Lost business (businesses in other countries not willing to deal with the US because we use a strange measurement system)
• Cost of doing conversions between US customary and metric constantly
  • Time to do the conversion
  • Material cost of errors
  • Time cost of errors
  • Lost opportunity cost (more difficult to quantify)
  • Medical cost of errors (lost lives, extra time in hospital, etc)
• Material waste from supplying multiple measurement systems for everything we make
• Having multiple inventories to deal with different measurement units
• Time wasted in school (re-learning metric every few years because it's not used in daily life, teaching a difficult system of measures, using the difficult system of measures in other areas, teaching multiple systems of measures)
  • There's a difference between the cost of teaching US customary and the cost of doing some other calculation using a klunky measurement system
• Culture clash issues when traveling (issues in both directions, difficult to quantify)
• Cost of scams based around how little of the US customary system most people understand

Cost of Metricating

• Material cost of changing (can be offset by replacing things as they naturally need replacement)
• Planning cost
• Confusion cost during change over (largely being incurred daily anyway due to the dual-measures state we're in, would go up temporarily during main part of conversion)