About a month ago, I wrote about how Sears had started selling “50 inch class” TVs in place of actual “50 inch” TVs. The fine print revealed that the actual size of the TV might be 49.5 inches or what have you. At the end of the article, I was musing about vendor honesty. I said:

. . . beware the marketing, and, just in case Sears is being the most honest, rather than the least by adding this word, better bring a tape measure and make sure your TV is what you think you are paying for.

I noticed in today’s sales flyers that Best Buy has joined the game. In big print, it will say “50 inch” and in finer print below, “49.8 inch diagonal measure”. Well, if it’s a 49.8 inch diagonal measure, then it isn’t a 50 inch TV, now is it?

Staples has also joined the game with their computer monitors, but on the other team. Their flyer today had a computer monitor advertised as “True 19 inch”.

I have a suspicion that some of these differences result from conversions from metric. As many of my readers will know, the US is the only major country that hasn’t had the good sense to switch off of our customary measures and onto the metric system. We also haven’t had the good sense to make our own goods, instead letting everyone else in the world make them for us. As such, I expect these TVs and monitors may be something like a 126cm (which is about 49.5″) or 127cm (which is almost, but not quite, 50″) units, and that the differential gets larger as the monitors do. Still, there’s no reason for not specifying a correct size, at least to a tenth or eighth of an inch, or at least rounding down. Anything else is dishonest.

Errata

I looked again at the Best Buy ads. The word “class” is there, but in very small, grey-on-white print. Pretty scummy.