The kid should have known, I agree. But what kind of scale did the cutter use to weigh the ham? Condidering the exchange was in a supermarket, was it an electronic one? Did it display in ounces? Or tenths and hundreths of a pound?
Anymore, I’m used to seeing cutters and counter staff using electronic scales that display decimals to two places.
“Did it display in ounces?”
That’s a very good point. I’ll bet you are exactly right. I’ll have to check it next time I’m in. Thanks for pointing that out?
I recall there was a display for the customer to see and it showed decimal fractions of a pound.
Even so, people working in delis should know the basics: 16 ounces to the pound, 8 ounces is a half pound is 0.5 pounds.
Of course, if we used grams and kilograms, things would be a lot easier. I remember my two freshman physics courses that all used SI units. By the time I got into my engineering courses in my sophomore year, we switched to English units. It was harder going from a year of using metric to English units than it was getting comfortable with metric in my frosh year.