My hypothesis is that poor service is an index of retail workers' excellent quantitative literacy that is not measured by Adult Literacy Surveys. When customers ask dumb questions about products, retail workers's working-class calculators automatically start crunching numbers, regarding the proportions of profit margins on the products in question that go into their paychecks and the probabilities of how their answers (and non-answers) would impact their job security, chances of promotions, pay raises and reductions, and so on. Working-class calculators tend to spit out the following recommendation in a second: read the poor customers, who must be functionally illiterate, the product labels that they evidently cannot read, or just say to them, "I dunno." -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>