GG and CD shop clerks

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

At 12:19 PM 7/13/01 +0000, Kate Clunies-Ross wrote:

>And like Anne I also hjave encountered someone working in a record store
>who asked "Glenn who?"   Yeah. Honest.  Her next question , after I
>replied "Gould" as clearly as I could, was actually "How do you spell
>that?" I am not sure how many  reasonable spelling  variations of  the
>name Glenn Gould there are, but sometimes I despair of the human race
>.....  ;-)

Yep.  CD shop clerks who have no concept of good music, or of music
history (of even the past 25 years of ANY kind of music).  They just sell
"product."

But I despair even more when I see the inability of CD shop clerks to
understand sixth-grade arithmetic. They're being paid to do numbers
accurately, but they have no concept of how numbers work. They have no
mental sensors to catch it when something is obviously WAY OFF.

Last week at a typical CD shop in a mall I bought three CDs from a sale
display. The sign said everything with the yellow "SUPER BUY" sticker
would have 75% discount at the register. A nice sale. The original prices
of the items were 19.99, 9.99, and 9.99.

The clerk, a guy about 25, rang them up and I noticed that each item was
only 50% off at the register. I always watch the register because I know
that retail clerks often don't know how to do arithmetic. They just do
whatever the register says and they assume it's right. (If something is
not in the computer, it doesn't exist.) I said, "These all have a yellow
sticker and are supposed to be 75% off; the register rang only 50%."

The clerk asked me to show where this sale was, and I pointed: directly in
front of where we were, in plain sight. So he re-ran all three items and
came up with a total of 15.00 plus tax. I said, "Sorry, that's still not
right. That's only a little over 60% off, not 75%." He said, "No, it rang
up 50% the first time and I took another 25% off of that, so 75%." I said,
"No, it doesn't work that way."

Confused, he then brought the next clerk into it, a gal about 25. We
explained that it was supposed to be 75% off but the register originally
rang only 50%. I pointed to the same sale display where this was
advertised. She said, "OK, I guess we'll have to figure this out by hand.
How much is it supposed to be?"

I said helpfully, pointing at each item in turn, "Five bucks, 2.50, 2.50."
She said, "No, you can't round them off like that, it has to be exact." I
said, "That _is_ exact. I took each original price, divided by 4, and it's
to the nearest penny." (I'm thinking, how hard IS this? Or couldn't they
just take another 50% off the original 50% to get the 75%?)

They obviously both didn't believe that this method of dividing by 4 is
correct, and they stared at me as if there is nobody on this planet who
can do arithmetic in his head.

So they took fully two minutes figuring something on paper, privately.
They then ran each item through the register again, and this time the
prices came up 4.00, 1.40, 1.40. The total was just over 7.00 with the
tax.

I started to say a third time, "No, that still isn't right, now it's 3.00
too low...." but before I said it aloud I thought, "Hang it, they're never
going to get it right, or if they do by some chance get it right they
won't believe me that it's right.  I'll just pay this and shut up now." I
paid, I said, "Sorry I had to make an argument," and I left.

What should I have said? "Sorry you both missed school the year they
taught percents and problem-solving?" I can understand that some people
just don't get math. That's OK. But these people were professionals.
Whatever happened to thinking outside the computer?

I looked at the sales slip later. Evidently they rolled it back to the
original 50% off 9.99, 4.99, 4.99 and then manually took off 5.99, 3.59,
3.59. Decent idea, wrong execution. Staring at it now I still can't figure
out how they came up with those particular numbers. Their numbers aren't
proportionate to one another. Anyone?

More importantly, what thought processes go through their minds?  There
has to be SOME pattern to it, but what?  Yesterday's Dilbert seems
apropos:
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20010712.html


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot