Dear Ms Bazant,
Could you please pass this email on to your Managing Directors in the
USA and in Australia as I have been unable to find their email
addresses. Thank you.
Dear Managing Director,
I am writing to let you know that I believe that your policy of using
the terms 'six inch' and 'foot long' has many negative implications
both for SUBWAY and for Australia as a whole.
For example, have you considered how much your policy to reintroduce
inches and feet into Australia might be costing your company and your
SUBWAY franchisees?
Cost estimates
When I worked with the Australian Building Industry on their
metrication transition in the 1970s, we estimated that successful
metrication led to savings of about 10 % from gross turnover and
about 15 % of net profit for both contractors and sub-contractors.
These key savings came from both using the simpler metric
measurements and from removing dual measurements and the conversions
between them.
These figures were confirmed later (1980) by a survey of the
Confederation of British Industry (CBI). They reported that having a
single set of metric measures saved major UK companies about 9 % of
turnover and led to an average increase of 14 % in net profits when
compared with companies that used a dual approach (as SUBWAY does in
Australia).
If SUBWAY were to fully use the metric system in Australia, you could
probably plan for similar substantial cost decreases and increases in
net profits when your metrication policy begins to have its full effect.
How does this happen?
Your suppliers will be immediately aware from your change from an
'inches and feet' to a metric policy will mean that they will lose
whatever advantages they had to confuse your staff using the
obfuscating tactics that are always present with the use of dual
measurements.
The expressions, 'six inch' and 'foot long', sound easy enough, but
they encapsulate a mindset that makes it clear to all of your staff —
from Team Members through Restaurant General Managers to Head Office
Staff — that SUBWAY Head Office has a very old pre-metric measurement
policy.
So, you might now expect that some (or many) of them, will think it
is now OK to negotiate (say) restaurant repairs in feet and inches
instead of millimetres and it is now OK to negotiate food supplies
and recipes in pounds instead of kilograms with all the attendant,
and necessary with dual measures, conversion confusion. (However,
your campaign of noting fat content in grams is a step in the right
direction.) Conversions are very time consuming, costly, prone to
error, and can also make arrangements legally risky as Australian
contracts made in old pre-metric units of measure, either written or
verbal, are void (Australian 'National Measurement Act 1960').
Education and training
I assume that you are aware that no child in an Australian school has
been taught the old pre-metric measures since 1970 — 38 years ago —
so you will already know that you have had to enhance your internal
training program (read spend more time and money).
In particular, you have needed to develop comprehensive training of
all staff under the age of about 45 to understand the old pre-metric
measures. You will also have spent more effort to get schools in
Australia to revert to training your potential staff and customers in
the old pre-metric measures you are promoting with your 'inches and
feet' policy.
Australian economy
After you consider how much your 'inches and feet' policy is
currently costing your company, you might like to reflect on the cost
of your policy if it were applied to the Australian economy as a
whole. My estimate is that reintroducing dual measurements to
Australia could cost about 60 billion dollars per year (9 % of 674.6
billion (2006 estimate)).
I'm probably wrong
I am aware that everything I have said above might be based on
incorrect assumptions. It could be that you don't have a measurement
policy at all — either new or old — nor any long term goal of
enmeshing the entire Australian economy into a mish-mash of old and
new measurements.
A more likely scenario is that Australian representatives from your
company spent some time in the USA where they simply copied someone
else's marketing idea for your 'inches and feet' policy. My
assumption that this happened in the USA is based on the observation
that the USA is now the only place in the world that still ostensibly
uses inches, feet, and calories. I say ostensibly because the use of
the metric system in the USA is largely hidden from the public; see
http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/DontUseMetric.pdf to find out
how deeply engrained the metric system is in the USA.
However, you may not be aware of how much the lack of a measurement
policy is costing the USA. For more information on the costs of dual
measurements in the USA, you might like to go to http://
www.metricationmatters.com/docs/CostOfNonMetrication.pdf where you
can view an estimate of the current dual measurement costs of non-
metrication practices as probably costing the USA about 1.15 trillion
dollars per annum.
Yours faithfully,
Pat Naughtin
P.S. When you make your inevitable upgrade to the metric system,
might I suggest that you choose to use millimetres. Your small
sandwich would then become the '150' and your large sandwich the
'300'. As about 85 % of Australian occupations use millimetres at
work every day this could prove profitable for you.
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the
modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they
now save thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for
their businesses. Pat provides services and resources for many
different trades, crafts, and professions for commercial, industrial
and government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and in the USA.
Clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST, and
the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. (See: http://
www.metricationmatters.com ). Pat Naughtin is editor of the 'Numbers
and measurement' chapter of the Australian Government Publishing
Service 'Style manual – for writers, editors and printers', he is
recognised as a Lifetime Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist
(LCAMS) with the United States Metric Association (USMA), and he is a
member of the National Speakers Association of Australia (NSAA) and
the International Federation for Professional Speakers (IFPS).
Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
