In France, you will still hear people in the food markets, especially older folk, ask for 'une livre de tomates' literally 'a pound of tomatoes' but what they will be expecting to be served and will be given is 500 grams. France invented the metric system of weights and measures and the country along with most of the rest of Europe was completely metricated by around 1850.
In Normandy, I was offered some second-hand oak beams recovered from a demolished barn. They were priced by the 'pied cube' or cubic foot but when I asked what their 'pied' was in metric measure, it turned out that it was considerably smaller than a UK/US foot!
The enormous variation in weights and measures with the same name across the country used to cause significant problems in trade which is why standardized weights and measures were introduced in the first (to enormous opposition)
