I walked into a wholefood grocery store today. This isn't your little shop with a few limp veggies and some dodgy looking tofu burgers for sale. This was a supermarket that had just about anything you would expect to find at any other supermarket, but most of it was certified organic. You could even get organic wines, and I'm talking about Malbec, Merlot, Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, the works.

One of the things that took a while to realise was that the prices were far higher than I would have expected. You see, I have been involved in the periphery of a number of organic markets, and in all of these we tried to keep the prices close to that of the chemically grown crops that you get at your average supermarket. This market, however, was charging close to double what I would have expected to pay for most goods, and I have it on reliable information that it is closer to 3 times what the average supermarket would sell their non-organic food for. When I first looked at the prices it didn't register because they were rather reasonable for someone who is used to viewing prices per kilogram. Instead they were price per pound, and a kilogram is roughly 2.2 pounds.

Even with that drawback it was obviously a success, with the carpark full and a new store being planned that will be at least twice the size.

On the other hand the prices of wines was quite reasonable, with some starting at under $4 per 750ml bottle. Which brings up an interesting oddity. The US primarily uses the Imperial system of measurement, with some US twists (like the fact that their gallon is 3/4 the size of an Imperial or British gallon). They tried to change over to the metric system but it failed miserably, so they are stuck with their oddball version of Imperial measurements. One of the things they did manage to change was the size of bottles of spirits and wines. They were originally a "fifth", meaning one fifth of a US gallon, or 757ml. Since this is so close to the more widely used 750ml standard throughout the world, they managed to sneak that one past everyone.

The story of the failure of the metric system in the US is interesting, and one that is well worth looking up. It occured around the same time as other countries like Australia and Canada were making the change. Australia managed the change rather painlessly, but then we had already changed over to decimal currency just a decade before, so I think that may have helped. Certainly as I remember it the change was relatively quick and painless, helped by the mandating of a cut-off date and rules to make sure consumers were not disadvantaged by the change. This meant that instead of 500ml replacing the 568ml pint, we had 600ml bottles. Similarly the pound was replaced by the half kilo which again was about 10% larger. As most prices were held to the pre-metric values, consumers won out.