I notice in Lowe's and Home Depot, nearly every box is marked in English and Spanish, but French seems quite rare. I don't object to the Spanish, but I do get annoyed when all the boxes are turned so the Spanish face is visible and the English isn't. (this happens at Costco too) I wonder if it has to do with the primary language of the stocking clerks? (or somebody else who speaks English bought the last "English" box?)
--- On Sat, 9/12/09, James R. Frysinger <[email protected]> wrote: From: James R. Frysinger <[email protected]> Subject: [USMA:45801] Re: Unusual USC/metric combo on packaging To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Cc: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Date: Saturday, September 12, 2009, 8:47 PM 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
