Getting What You Pay For:
Weights and Measures Tips for Consumers
It's hard to be a smart consumer today. You think about the products you buy and the amount you can spend. Can I afford this? Is this the best buy? Am I getting my money's worth?
Almost everything we buy is sold either by
weight, volume, length, count or measure. Think of examples - a dozen eggs, a gallon of
milk, a liter of wine, a yard of cloth, a pound of hamburger, or a cord of firewood.
Without standard measurements, it would be difficult to do simple things like use cookbooks or buy carpeting, laundry detergent and fabric.
Keeping the Market in Balance. . .
You don't carry a scale or measuring tape with you to check the weight or measure of everything you buy. How do you know you're getting what you pay for?
For hundreds of years, your local weights and measures officials have been working behind the scenes to protect consumers, businesses, and manufacturers from unfair practices.
Weights and measures officials work in agriculture departments, consumer protection offices and other state and local government agencies.
These men and women use highly accurate equipment to inspect scales, meters, scanning equipment and packaged products at supermarkets. They also inspect weighing and measuring equipment and packages at warehouses, packaging plants, feed mills, shipping companies, lumberyards and gasoline stations. They act as a third party to help maintain fairness and keep the marketplace in balance.
Each state has a metrology laboratory, which has a set of standard weights and measures. These are used to check the accuracy of the equipment used by weights and measures officials and industry.
The Westchester County Department of Consumer
Protection, Weights and Measures, along with the National Conference on Weights and
Measures brought the information provided in these pages to you. The National Conference
on Weights and Measures is sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, United States Department of Commerce.
Department of Consumer Protection, Weights and Measures, 112 East Post Road, White Plains, NY 10601. (914) 995-2179.