First off, the unit of mass in the US is the slug. (Not very poetic, is it?) An object with a mass of one slug exerts a force of 32.17 pounds on its support.
Or you could use the poundal. Or even the lb mass. While it is true that a great many errors are made in unit conversion, that is not the exclusive province of imperial units of measure, and a few of us old farts have figured out how to do our work correctly without metric units.
Technically the metric system was the first legal system in the US - courtesy of Thomas Jefferson, who had it enshrined in US law as a legal system for weights and measures. This was a couple hundred years ago, so don't tell ME the US lags behind the world in going metric!
Oh, and there is no country in the world that is truly 100% metric. If you examing the dimensions of I-Beams or pipe in Great Britain, you will find they convert to exactly the same piece of iron as the old "imperial" standards. I'll never forget the time in the late '70s when I did a presentation for some engineers from Mitsubishi Nagasaki Machinery. The interpreter stuck up her hand, and asked "Please sir, they want to know what is a Pascal?" I went immediately to psi and they knew exactly what I was talking about.
I like many things about the old imperial units. For example, I can more readily delay that exercise program by telling myself "My weight isn't that bad - it's under 15 stone."
The US can get away with not being metric because our economy is so large. Don't kid youself - if the costs of not going metric exceed the cost of converting, we'll go metric. That's a decision every company makes for itself in our system. Look at the automotive industry for example.