While visiting family in Florida, my younger sisters ended up taking us to disney world. Despite my grumblings about the ridiculously high price tag for admission, it was a fun thing to see. I heard many of the staff at the shops, rides, and around the park answering questions to the guests in Spanish, Portuguese, and even Japanese.
It seems that family tourists from around the world love coming all the way to the U.S. just to see disney land for some reason, and it was super fun listening to all the different languages.
Lot’s of Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, some Korean, you name it. Especially fun was to see the staff turn people away from the hall of presidents show in spanish: telling them that the ride was under renovation while adding the new president robot.
But the coolest thing I saw was at one of the small, less popular gift shops we wandered into. We saw an older white guy manning the store, having a fluent conversation with a guest in an Asian language I didn’t recognize: Maybe vietnamese or thai, or something less common than Japanese or Chinese. It was really cool to see how many people working there were bilingual!
In my opinion, if you are getting paid to help people in multiple languages, you should be getting paid more than 9 dollars an hour, especially when you work for the most profitable amusement park company on earth.
That’s pretty neat, in Finland we have a high end, luxury department store called Stockmann. It consist of many different stores (jewelry, cosmetic, etc.), they also have a separate “supermarket” called colloquially Stockan herkku (herkku meaning delicacy). There it is not uncommon to see the staff speak Swedish, German, French, Spanish and Italian as well as the obligatory English and Finnish.
If I remember correctly they do get a 3 % bonus for every additional language they speak to a certain standard. I think Swedish was excluded because Swedish is the co-official language of Finland and Stockmann was founded by a German immigrant and has become a Swedish-Finnish institution so it is sort of a unofficial requirement.
I wonder if Harrod’s in England and KaDeWe in Germany have similar arrangement’s.
I don’t know this for a fact, but I strongly suspect that Harrods could quickly find a staff member who speaks one of the major world languages (Arabic, Spanish, Russian, etc) if need be.
I mean, from what I hear they get über-rich folks from the Middle East and and Russia just descend on them to spend tens of thousands of Pounds in one single shopping trip! So I’m pretty sure they’d have some staff members who speak multiple languages. I’d be surprised if that were not the case.
Yeah, they certainly have no qualms of going after the super rich’s money. That reminds me that Harrod’s has planed to make a underground tunnel across the street from a retirement home. Or they plan to redesign a old car park into a luxury retirement home and build a tunnel that leads to the store. The expected price per unit is 5 million pounds.
"Especially fun was to see the staff turn people away from the hall of presidents show in spanish: telling them that the ride was under renovation while adding the new president robot. "