[tavavex]

Meanwhile, here in Canada I've never seen "sticks of butter", only the large bricks. They're the same size as American ones, and labeled as 454g, but I only recently found out that in some places in the US, they cut them in fours. Before that, the phrase didn't mean anything to me, and I thought it referred to throwing the whole brick in. The smaller 250g packages also exist, but they're rare.

I can't guarantee that the sticks don't exist anywhere, but I've lived in several cities all over the country and I've never spotted anything like that

[bregma]

The 250 g half-bricks are very common. It's how the foo-foo frilly butter is sold ("cultured" butter, imported French butter with 94% fat content, butter made exclusively from milk squeezed from grass-fed cows, etc) because no one is willing to pay $15.00 for a pound of butter but they'll pay $8.00 for a half pound.

[inferiorhuman]

  I only recently found out that in some places in the US,
  they cut them in fours

That's pretty much the standard in the US. It's common enough that there's a bit of an east/west divide as to how the quarters are shaped. When I worked in a grocery store we'd also sell individual quarters (but I never actually saw anyone buy them as such).

[jandrewrogers]

Some American butter is wrapped in wax paper as regular sticks with measurement markers on it so that it is easy to measure. Plenty of large bricks though.

[guappa]

And here we use the markers to know how many grams that part is… how silly of us!

[xav0989]

I’ve seen them in stores in Canada, but they’re usually more expensive than the 454g blocks. Expensive enough that it’s usually better to buy the block and portion it as needed.

[philistine]

Typical Americana. Cutting up and packaging in extra foil what could simply be sold as a larger brick.

See also, milk bags.

[syncsynchalt]

Bricks won't fit in our butter trays. And it'd be an ordeal to open a brick, quarter it, then put the opened 3/4 of the brick back into cold storage until needed again.

Our butter isn't wrapped in foil, each stick is wrapped in wax paper and the whole thing is boxed in thin cardboard.

[unsnap_biceps]

fancy butter is sometimes in foil, https://www.kerrygoldusa.com for example