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Comment by warwick | Hacker News Reader

Value Villages are predominately Canadian. It's possible that the records weren't the problem, but that the girl wasn't used to inches.

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I don't know anyone here that uses centimetres over inches. IT's what we're taught in school and used on legal documents but everyone I talk to always speaks in inches.

The only three things I hear referred to in inches are height, woodworking, and paper sizes. Everything else tends to be metric. (23, lived in BC/AB/SK/MB/PQ/NB, your experiences may vary.)

In my experience as a lifelong resident of the Centre Of The Universe (that would be Southern Ontario to non-Canadians), we buy butter by the pound, not by the 454-gram-package - no matter what it says on the wrapper.

Also on the cooking theme, oven temperatures are measured in Fahrenheit and recipe quantities are measured in cups, teaspoons and tablespoons.

For weather, summer temperatures are generally measured in Fahrenheit (because it's just not that impressive to say, "Man, it's 40 degrees out!") but winter temperatures are generally measured in Celsius (because it is impressive to say, "Man, it's minus 20 out!").

I'll concede defeat on this one. I've heard most of those examples but they never even occurred to me. Other than my grandparents generation, I _never_ hear temperatures in Farenheit. Weird.

No worries. Canada is nominally a metrickified country, but the enthusiasm kind of fell off somewhere in the 1980s, and we never progressed much beyond soft metric. That is to say, we still extensively use imperial denominations, but expressed in metric terms - like the 454 g bar of butter, or the 341 ml bottle of beer.

Other areas, like home construction, are still exclusively imperial. We use 8 foot 2-by-4 boards, not 2.4 m 5cm-by-10cm boards.

I beg to differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Inches_of_Snow

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