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I was at the supermarket recently when I took note of something my eyes had passed thousands of times before. The cans of my favorite sodas were 12 ounces, while the bottles were 2 liters.


It caught my eye because the units of measurement for the same product weren't the same. The can was in US customary units, while the bottle was in metric units.
Today, the American public remains mostly on the side of US customary units. Polling from 2016 found that only 32% of Americans wanted to go metric.
This may seem like a small thing, but, as I learned in this week's episode of my podcast Margins of Error, the unwillingness of America to take up the metric system speaks to a far larger issue: American exceptionalism.