Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> 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."
I disagree. In general people want to do the best they can and they take pride in "knowing" and gratification in being able to help. One obvious difference between older and younger workers is that younger workers are less experienced and therefore know less. Twenty years from now these younger workers will be more knowledgeable and more helpful.
Joanna