Week 2 - How big is a piece of 4x4 lumber?

Abramov v Home Depot
Case number 1:17-cv-01860
Northern District of Illinois

How big is a piece of 4x4 lumber?

If you said 4x4, you'd be wrong. The term 4x4 refers to the size when it's originally rough-cut from the tree.  Once it's planed [smoothed], it measures 3-1/2 x 3-1/2.

This has been the industry standard since at least the 1950s, if not for the past 100 years.

So if you actually bought a board that was 4” x 4”, it wouldn't fit where you intended to put it.  Which proves that the Plaintiff who filed the lawsuit against Home Depot in 2017, claiming the store falsely advertised the dimensions of its boards, did not actually intend to build anything with the $5 million the lawsuit demanded.

A similar lawsuit against Menards was dismissed in September 2017.

On March 12, 2018, a federal court dismissed [threw out] the lawsuit against Home Depot.  The judge said the term “4x4” would not have misled a reasonable consumer.  Which implies that these two Plaintiffs were not … well, you get the idea.