A lot of stuff here in Middle Tennessee is labeled in both English and
Spanish on the packaging. Lowe's does that quite a bit and one day my
wife pointed out to the store manager that it would be nice if at least
a few of the boxes of the ceiling fans she was looking at were turned
around to show the English side!
We have a fairly significant Hispanic population here -- probably due to
the very large nursery business in our area -- but that alone would not
account for all the English/Spanish bilingual labeling, I suspect. We
also have a fair number of Tiendas Mexicanas (Mexican convenience
stores) and most of their stuff is labeled only in Spanish and only in
metric units -- fooey (or however you say that in Spanish) on the dual
labeling law.
Jim
[email protected] wrote:
I came across an unusual (for me, at least) kind of packaging today.
The product was a raised seat to be placed on a toilet for those who
find a regular height toilet seat too low to comfortably sit down on or
get up from; the store where I found this was a pharmacy.
This was not a NAFTA box (since there was no French). Morever, while
there was also Spanish, that text was in a smaller size font than the
English text. What struck me was that, while the height of and the
acceptable weight on the raised seat was given in nice round USC
(Imperial) numbers in the English text (with no metric), the Spanish
text showed the same values in unrounded (odd-ball looking) metric (and
only metric).
If it were a NAFTA package, I could understand why the Spanish would use
metric only since the Spanish would be targeting a Mexican market (and
the French on such a package would be targeting a French-Canadian
market). Since this was an English/Spanish bilingual package, I would
assume the Spanish is there to target Spanish speakers living in the
United States, most of whom presumably have been "converted" to USC by
sheer habituation over the years.
Have others seen this kind of packaging? Any hypotheses as to what the
rationale is for this?
-- Ezra
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
