I'm going to set the scene here: I work in retail. Have done for a few years now. And over the years, customers coming into our stores seem to be worse and worse at speaking English. The number of people, families or not, who come in, point at something they want, and then talk to each other in another language while I deal with their stuff, is so staggeringly high it's almost too much for me to handle. I don't work in a foreign country, I work in the country I was born and raised in. Now, I can fully understand if they're tourists visiting for whatever reason, but when you can identify certain families or individuals who have been coming into the store for as long as I've worked there, it really grinds my gears. I wish I had the right to refuse to serve them while they were jabbering away in their languages. It's so disrespectful and outright rude. If I were to move into another country on a permanent basis, I would work on learning the lingo immediately. Two years later though? Unthinkable. It's infuriating. One of my favourite examples: Eastern-European woman comes in and wants to buy a garden hose. There's a specific one she wants to order, as she has the model number written down. I check the stock system and see that we have none left. So, I say to her that it's out of stock. She seems to understand, nodding her head. I offer to see if we have similar hoses in stock, and we do. I tell her that the one we have in is slightly more expensive, and she says "OK". So I put the new hose through and tell her the price, and she says "no no, twenty five", the price of the hose she wanted. So I'm standing there thinking "holy -blam!- did you not understand anything I was just saying?" and she then seems to grasp that it's not available. Now, if this was a tourist, I'd understand. But what tourist buys a garden hose? Anyone else feeling their nationality being drained from them by migrant workers and families?