British Find New System Doesn’t Quite Measure Up : Weights: The switch to the metric scales may satisfy England’s European trading partners, but shoppers accustomed to pounds and ounces haven’t a milligram of respect for kilograms.

Norah Bagnall went to the market to buy some ripe red tomatoes and saw a price that looked like it had doubled.

It wasn’t twice what it should be, but rather 2.2 times the old price, as the Sainsbury grocery switched to kilograms from the British imperial system of using pounds and ounces.

“I’m British and I don’t like this European stuff,” Bagnall said.

Under orders from European Union officials in Brussels, Britain is adopting the metric system for all packaged foods as of Oct. 1. This naturally outrages many Britons who’d rather stick with their old ways.

As stores change their weights ahead of the deadline, store aisles are filled with confused people and angry words. Many big grocery stores provide plastic conversion cards and post conversion charts at the meat counter to ease the transition. But this hasn’t stopped the shoppers from squawking.

“They’ve got those kilowatts or whatever--I don’t understand,” said Dorothy Jones, 79, on her way into the Waitrose supermarket in West Hampstead. “It drives me bloody mad.”

“It’s too much,” agreed her daily shopping companion, 80-year-old Florence Fairclough. “Our brains can’t handle that as we get old.”

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Another gray-haired shopper, Peggy Whitburn, said her comments on the Brussels bureaucrats would be unprintable.

“They should leave us alone,” Fairclough said. “We’d be better off as we were.”

Like it or not, Britain is undergoing the process of “metrication,” and any merchant who fails to adapt can be fined 1,000 pounds, or about $1,500.

Perhaps because divisions over Britain’s role in a unified Europe have threatened to bring down the Conservative government of Prime Minister John Major, the government’s official release on metrication emphasizes what won’t change.

Pint glasses of beer in pubs, pint bottles of milk delivered at the doorstep and mile markers on roads will still be a part of British life.

And stores can keep weighing out loose items by the pound and ounce through the end of the decade. Facing next month’s deadline for selling all packaged goods in kilos and grams, many stores are switching everything just to be done with the deed.

The change is a psychological blow to many Britons who still can’t get over the loss of empire. They find it galling to have the weight of their plastic-wrapped chickens measured out by bureaucrats in another land.

It also stirs concerns that stores will take advantage of the situation by slyly nudging prices higher as they perform the conversion. It will be hard for consumers to figure things out unless they know exactly what the old price was and bring a calculator with them.

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Alan Street, chief executive of the Institute of Trading Standards, said this sort of practice was widespread in Britain’s last big consumer changeover, the “decimalization” of money that took effect Feb. 15, 1971.

Britain tossed out its old currency system, getting rid of shillings and making each pound worth 100 pence instead of the old 240 pence. Many merchants raised prices in the process.

“All the adjustments seemed to be upward--never downward,” Street said.

The big groceries insist this will not happen with metrication.

But trading standards officers in Scotland have already seen consumers being shorted. New milk cartons in some stores look like an old British pint, or 568 milliliters, but they contained just 500 milliliters of milk. The price stayed the same, meaning consumers paid 12% more.

But some people are happy to see the changes.

Ann Friedlaender, who grew up in Germany using the metric system, says it’s about time Britain caught up with its European neighbors.

“It’s much easier to calculate to 100,” Friedlaender said.

Stjohn Cooper finds the change “logical,” but admits he won’t have to bother with learning the new system.

“My wife does the shopping, not me,” Cooper said.