Reply #6: Such people deserve to be parachuted into a [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

remote part of Mexico (or some other country whose language they do not speak) and told, "Okay, now survive."

Talk about English skills! That sign is so ambiguously written that you don't know whether it means "I won't buy from anyone who doesn't speak English" or "I won't sell to anyone who doesn't speak English."

I've been in a lot of stores and restaurants run by immigrants, and while I've run into poor English, I've never run into NO English. If the legal owners of the business don't speak English well enough to interact with customers, they usually put one of their children or another young bilingual member of their ethnic community out front.

It is simply unreasonable to expect an immigrant storekeeper to understand the slack-jawed, ungrammatical mumbling of the type of person who would write such a sign.

And I can't imagine a business owner telling paying customers who are standing at the counter with merchandise and money in hand that they should get out and not buy anything. Monolingual American tourists impose themselves on stores in foreign countries all the time, and I've actually seen them get mad at storekeepers who don't speak English (in a non-English-speaking country).

Given the ambiguity of the statement on the sticker, I'd be tempted to add, "Learn to write proper English yourself."