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Someone who has no business buying their own lumber or trying to do anything with it.
I was looking through an ad from the Home Depot or Menard's where they listed their lumber prices, and below the lumber size it listed true size. I just chuckled at the time because it made sense to keep on the lookout for some chuckle head who didn't know any better.Good grief.
There are a bunch of people who need to read this: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3074/why-arent-two-by-fours-two-inches-by-four-inches
I learned nominal size vs true size from my grandfather years before it was mentioned in any of the construction classes I took. These "class action" morons are probably the yuppie suburbanites who feel their being screwed because the nominal 2x4 wasn't an actual 2x4.
They probably have so many steps on the supply chain that rely on exact measurement that they're much more interested in hitting the target exactly than the customer.
They might be more accurate wit expensive woods and trim pieces, but for standard lumber carpenters have what some might consider a significant margin of error, so I wouldn't expect the lumber mill to be all that exacting. When my brothers were building a cabin for my parents, my one brother who works HVAC started calling lengths to my brother who framed houses at the time. The HVAC brother was calling down values within 1/32" and it was frustrating my carpenter brother because they work in 1/8" increments. My HVAC brother was just shaking his head at the MOE used in building houses, and may have been why he spent so much time doing much of the finishing work on his house himself some three or four years later.I suspect the machine that cuts the wood is calibrated better than your micrometer.
