HO? 1/87?

HO? 1/87? N SCALE?
How many times over the years have you purchased an HO item clearly stated on the packaging that is completely out of scale with the other HO items? Here is partial list of popular manufactures that produce these claim's; ROCO, Bachmann, Walthers, Imex, Woodland Scenes and Classic Metal Works to name just a few. It's extraordinary how different these scales vary from manufacture to manufacture even though they claim to be HO scale; when clearly the same item especially vehicles and how much the difference is in size! To be even more specific I recently purchased two vehicles for my dioramas, one an HO (construction type) Grader from Woodland Scenes and a Classic Metal Works HO 1938 Ford military command car from a vender on ebay and the grader came from Woodland Scenes and in comparison I bought the same ?HO? Grader from ROCO on ebay immediately one could see the extreme difference in the scales although right there on the packaging it stated HO on both. It was obvious to even the simplest of modelers the two did not match! The Metal Works that I purchased from the ebay vendor had stated "you should contact Classic Metal Works, They have won many awards for the accuracy of their models and the pain staking research taken to produce these true to scale models. 100's of other retailers from Amazon to Modeltrainstuff.com to Walthers sell this product CMW 30244 as an HO 1:87 scale model you might want to call all of them and let these retailers know you think this is an N scale model not HO 1:87 scale.", which brings me to another important question; is ?1/87? normally associated directly with ?HO?and why?, and WHY can't these manufacture's all get on the same scale???????