Asklemmy

43936 readers

603 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

117

In the store, I sometimes encounter containers (e.g., beer, water, shampoo) with a volume of 618ml. Why exactly this number? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by evlogii@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] SeaJ@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We get the joy of both here in the US. Both are required to be listed and either can be a nice round number but generally it is the imperial one.

[–] dan@upvote.au 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love that both are listed.

You do sometimes see nice round metric numbers, for example soft drinks (soda / pop) often come in 2 litre bottles.

I'm still unsure as to why soft drink bottles are measured in litres while milk is measured in gallons... A carton of milk (half a gallon, 1.9L) is almost as large as a bottle of soft drink (2L) so it's strange they haven't converged.

There's also things like the TSA liquids limit, which is defined as exactly 100mL but commonly written as 3.4 fl oz.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Milk has been sold in gallons longer than pop has existed is my only guess for why milk hasn't switched.

The US government has been very on board with metric, for example the US was one of the original signatories of the metric convention. It's just not simple to mandate that people stop using traditional units and instead use the official standard units.

Pepsi and coke both have significant international business, which makes standard bottles appealing.
Additionally, in the mid seventies when the US was last making a push towards making the private sector switch Pepsi as a marketing gimmick switched to a bottle that was bigger than a typical coke bottle and also metric.
https://youtu.be/L6O4UeowF5I?si=fncOmRnbigWOrAsR

They hoped to be ahead of the curve in the US, better value than coke, and use one bottle everywhere.

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

which makes standard bottles appealing.

I was thinking about this, but if it's the case, why are cans different? US cans are 12 fl oz (355mL), Australian and New Zealand cans are 375mL, European and Middle Eastern cans are often 330mL.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

There's sadly no interesting answer. They just didn't try the marketing gimmick with cans.

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 11 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/L6O4UeowF5I?si=fncOmRnbigWOrAsR

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.