Weights and Measures

I remember watching my mum getting dinner ready one night when she suddenly hauled out the scale. She dumped all the meat on it with the wadding to catch the liquid, carefully weighed it and wrote down the weight. She compared that weight to the weight on the packaging. She then weighed the wadding. As it was before 5pm, she reached for the phone book. After a quick search, she dialed a number. "Hi, I wanted to know what the acceptable amount of liquid is that can drain out of a piece of meat?" Yes, my mother had called weights and measures. And sure enough, the amount of liquid coming out of the meat was not acceptable. When my mother came off the phone, I asked for an explanation. It was short and sweet. "I paid so much a pound for this piece of meat. And this percentage of it is liquid. So I paid x amount for the liquid which is not what I thought I was buying." I got it. It was a type of customer fraud.

Weights and measures are wonderful. When you call, they take your complaint and tell if you if you're being reasonable. They then go into the store. No store wants weights and measures to come knocking. Weights and Measures will do a random audit over a period of time. They're checking to see if this is a one-off occurrence or a systematic pattern. Either way, when after weights and measures has been around, the store improves massively. Most stores fly close to the regulations. They go as close as they can without actually failing to follow them. When a customer complains, they realise they've flown too close to the line and start giving themselves a bigger margin of error. As a customer, it's just nice to know that your gut feeling about how much of a product you're getting can easily be verified. If you're wrong, then you're wrong. But if you're right, then it will quickly be sorted out and you will have much better service in the coming days.