[lbo-talk] U.S. working class: functionally literate

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Mar 3 09:10:34 PST 2005



>Yet another example of dumbing down that does not involve
>between-class differences.
>
>Retail sales, especially hardware stores. Virtually all sales
>associates working there are working class. You can get useful
>information on various products and know-how from older associates
>(say, 40+), but if you ask younger ones (20+) a question, the
>chances are you will get a dumb look and either "I dunno" or he will
>read to you the product's label.
>
>Wojtek

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

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