Is it annoying to have hair salon employees speaking to each other in Spanish?

[Clothahump]

@astro

Per the article if your hairdresser was having a conversation in Spanish with another employee while working on your hair, would it make you vaguely uncomfortable if you didn’t speak Spanish? I’m not interested as much in the EEOC aspects of the case addressed in the article. I’m imore interested in how you would feel. Would it influence your decision about going there again?

Supercuts sued for ban on Spanish

If people are working in the USA, they should speak English on the job. That is the language of the country, whether they like it or not.

[Loopydude]

@Clothahump

If people are working in the USA, they should speak English on the job. That is the language of the country, whether they like it or not.

There is no “language of the country” in any official capacity. It’s an employer’s prerogative to impose certain standards of conduct (so long as civil rights are not violated, which is unclear to me in the hairdresser example), but this mythical “American language” monolith exists only in the minds of some chauvinists.

[OtakuLoki]

@Loopydude

I’m not picking on you, OtakuLoki, just using this as a partial summary of the thread. This seems to be the general attitude: I don’t care, but I can see why people might.

Loopydude, no worries.

And re-reading I think I expressed myself poorly.

My focus isn’t on the possibility of conversations about the person being served, but a more general definition of rudeness or politeness. By speaking in a language that the customer doesn’t share, the customer is being excluded from the possibility of joining said conversation. It’s not a matter of catering to paranoia, but a matter of percieved assumptions: if one is deliberately excluding someone from a conversation there can be a perception that the person is not being viewed as a real person.

Perhaps it is paranoia, after all, but not quite the same concern you’ve picked up on. (Which certainly is some people’s concern with the foreign language conversations.)

[PookahMacPhellimey]

I’m with Loopydude on this one. Couldn’t care less, even if they are actually talking about me.

In fact, I’m guilty of commenting on people in Dutch when out and about with a Dutch friend here in Ireland. If out with an Irish friend we have to whisper or wait two minutes till the person who we were commenting on has gone.

And because I live in a small community, I really have, to a large extent became immune to what people are saying about me. I have to, I would go bonkers if I worried about the small town rumour mill. So I try to be nice sort of person and only worry about the opinions of people I care about. Hairdressers and such would not be in that category.

[Paul_in_Qatar]

I used to work down the hall from the US Army Historian for Panama. Nice lady. She had her office decorated with all sort of old time photos. One of them was of some WWII command post. (It looked hot and humid.)

A sign on the wall said. “Speak Only English On The Radio!”

This non-problem has been with us forever.