Expensive to get wrongUnited States

The US: not a metric market in practice

The United States runs on US customary units, documents are US-Letter rather than A4. Net-content declarations, serving sizes, storage instructions and every dimension on a pack artwork have to be produced for this market rather than translated into it.

A metric-only artwork pipeline needs a second set of plates for this market, not a second language.

86 of a possible 90Tier B, systematic first-party observation. Nothing at this tier is allowed past 90, however good it looks.

Verified September 9, 2026Rechecked every 1095 days, next by September 8, 2029.

Constraint

Held since January 1, 2010A rule, law or policy that limits what you may do or say. The earliest date we are willing to say this held. It may well have been true before that; we do not backdate a record past the evidence we have read. Supported, version 1.

This entry is wrong if

The current Unicode CLDR release records the United States as a metric market for everyday measurement, or the market’s weights-and-measures law stops permitting non-metric declarations on consumer packaging.

Written before the record was published, not after. If you can show this, send it to hello@tryorbt.com and the correction goes on the record with the entry.

Evidence

Tier Bofficial-statistic
Unicode Consortium: Unicode CLDR 48 supplemental data
CLDR measurementData states this for US rather than inheriting metric.
Read 2026-08-10 · CC BY · about this source

History

v1createdAugust 10, 2026
Derived from the measurement-system family on 2026-08-10.

Append-only. Nothing in this list is edited or removed once written, including the entries that record our own mistakes. Every change to every record is on the corrections page, and the same log is in entries.json under revisions.

Cite this entry

“The US: not a metric market in practice”, The Orbt Market Index 0.1.0, entry omr:us:surface:measurement-system, retrieved September 9, 2026, https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/us--surface--measurement-system. Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22679129

Orbt, "The US: not a metric market in practice," Orbt Market Index, entry omr:us:surface:measurement-system, verified September 9, 2026, https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/us--surface--measurement-system.

@misc{orbt-us-surface-measurement-system,
  title        = {The US: not a metric market in practice},
  author       = {{Orbt}},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.22679129},
  note         = {The Orbt Market Index 0.1.0 (dataset DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22679129), entry omr:us:surface:measurement-system. Verified 2026-09-09},
  howpublished = {\url{https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/us--surface--measurement-system}},
  license      = {Orbt Index Public Licence. Free to quote and cite; not to redistribute}
}

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We derive from public sources and we do not independently audit them. Where a source says its own records are unverified, that carries through to us. What we do promise is that every figure is recomputed from stored rows, every claim publishes the observation that would overturn it, and every correction goes on the public log. If something here is wrong, tell us and it changes in the open.

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This entry is wrong if

Evidence

History

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