@lanodan I've been to Ireland they used metric. We had a tour guide who told us to guess the measurement of a tower (don't remember which one) and told us not to use our "American feet and inches".
@lanodan Metric has no equivalent for ft. A meter is more like a yard. A centimeter is more like an inch. I guess you have decimeters, but nobody uses those.
We actually do use metric for some stuff though. Scientists use metric (probably because they work with people around the world), track and field uses meters for distance, and we have 2-liter soda bottles (everything else is measured in ounces though).
One side effect about using the imperial system that nobody talks about is that since both weight and mass are measured using the same units, people think that mass and weight are the same thing. It bothered my high school physics teacher so much that he even talked to elementary school teachers and told them not to confuse mass and weight at a young age.
I quite feel like "weight" ought to be deprecated. With typically always be using Newton or creating a new word (say loaning from latin or ancient greek) to make it stuck to scientific.