ceigered:
Maybe, to make things easier, things should be assigned a number on a menu - e.g. "#1 Coca Cola. #2 Big Mac' et cetera, and then people can hold up the fingers for what they are ordering (or say them in the language if they know - maybe we can all use Latin numbers, they're fairly common these days). Of course, that fails when we get to "#245.3333 Crab burger with Angus beef and goats milk cheese". Unless we see someone with 245.3333 fingers.

There are some Midnight Oil videos out where you can see lot of fingers in the air. I'm not sure, but probably not by one person. I assume the requested some more songs by Midnight Oil

First of all, if I'm in China and there's a sign in Chinese saying "Chinese only", you can forget it. If you really don't speak any of a language, how would you even know that you should look up those particular words in your dictionary? I can't be looking up every single word on every single sign, wondering if that particular sign is important, and only finding that the sign that took me 20 minutes to look up in my dictionary says something like "Enjoy our delicious Tuesday special of roasted tripe with snout sauce!"

Regarding loss of business to slow orderers, you can easily lose just as much business to someone like my friend who can never decide what she wants, and holds up the whole line while hemming and hawing and asking a million questions about each potential choice.

Regarding special deals for people, I think you would realize that was happening quickly enough, and in a fast-paced and chaotic environment, if the people know each other, you don't even need to say anything to make a special deal. You only have to "forget" to charge them for some component of their order. You can do that as easily in English as in any other language, and with equally little awareness on the part of the other employees, no matter what language they speak.

For the record, when I'm abroad and attempting to order unfamiliar food, yes, it will take me longer than a native, even without a language problem. I think the vast majority of restaurant cashiers are honest, and I think that there is a greater likelihood of an English-speaking teen and his English-speaking friend giving each other free stuff, than there is that immigrants will jeopardize their employment by offering special deals to others who just happen to speak their native language. The sort of immigrants who would be working in a restaurant are not well-off, many of them send money back to their families in their home countries, and most of them would be in deep financial trouble if they ever lost their job.

erinja:First of all, if I'm in China and there's a sign in Chinese saying "Chinese only", you can forget it. If you really don't speak any of a language, how would you even know that you should look up those particular words in your dictionary? I can't be looking up every single word on every single sign, wondering if that particular sign is important, and only finding that the sign that took me 20 minutes to look up in my dictionary says something like "Enjoy our delicious Tuesday special of roasted tripe with snout sauce!"

Hhm, could an quick response code marker at the item and automatically browser redirect to the wikipedia entry solve that? Most websites recognizes the users browser default language. So, just theoretical: There's a food in China I don't know. It has a quick response code marker. I take my mobile and let it recognize the chinese wikipedia entry behind the qr code marker which explains this food. Due to my inbuilt cell phones web browsers german language settings the browser will redirected to the german wikipedia entry for this food. That would be great. But for this you need a cheap internet rate.

erinja:
Regarding loss of business to slow orderers, you can easily lose just as much business to someone like my friend who can never decide what she wants, and holds up the whole line while hemming and hawing and asking a million questions about each potential choice.

Hej, hej! That remembers myself to my last visit at some fast-food-restaurant in Melbourne. Normaly I don't eat inside this restaurants. So I don't know what the sortiment is. But one of my friends liked to go there. So, the shop assistant ask me the whole food option line-up in supersonic speed english and I got a laughing cramp. Okay, I didn't to starve.

erinja:
Regarding special deals for people, I think you would realize that was happening quickly enough, and in a fast-paced and chaotic environment, if the people know each other, you don't even need to say anything to make a special deal. You only have to "forget" to charge them for some component of their order. You can do that as easily in English as in any other language, and with equally little awareness on the part of the other employees, no matter what language they speak.

As far as there are no surveillance cameras. Generally, I agree.

I understand where you are coming from Erinja, and while native speakers are generally just as bad if not worse to do business with, from a business point of view, you're eliminating one potential collection of sales-issues. Furthermore, once again, how on earth do you do business with people who don't understand you, and with whom you don't understand either? It just doesn't work, yet people try it anyway. I'm talking about no English skills altogether here - semi-fluency or phrasebook English is a different matter altogether, and is more or less acceptable.

Personally, I think "no open footwear e.g. sandals" is a much bigger nuisance to society than saying "please speak our language so we can give you the best service possible and so we can make a profit easily", especially for me who practically lives in thongs (sandals) or goes barefoot. Those damn nightclubs expecting me to dance in closed shoes - they're clearly racist bigots who don't respect people of lazy-descent

ceigered:especially for me who practically lives in thongs (sandals) or goes barefoot.

Hej, hej, take care at the redback's. And the cockroaches and that darned 0.5 mm ants, too. This ants did me enforce to do the rainbow dance quite often.

I think you're all making some very good points. My problem is that we're not talking about a group of immigrants going into a restaurant and trying to order a steak tartar with a bottle of Chianti. They're getting a sandwich. It comes with or without onions. You can have cheese or no cheese. This is isn't rocket science. I just can't believe that this owner is having a genuine problem with immigrants holding up his queue due to a lack of English skills.

There are many times when I have eaten at a McDonald's in a foreign country and ordered by holding up three fingers and saying "coca-cola". You don't have to be Chomsky or Berlitz to handle that. And the McDonald's did not see the need to put up signs saying "Russian Only" or "Danish Only".

andogigi:I just can't believe that this owner is having a genuine problem with immigrants holding up his queue due to a lack of English skills.

In Vienna, we sometimes have the exactly opposite problem - the people who work at such a sandwich shop are sometimes immigrants who don't speak German very well. Once I ordered a piece of pizza at a small pizzeria at a railway station, and added that I wanted the piece without corn - but that last part wasn't understood (despite me repeating it a few times). The vendor then asked a co-worker who understood what I wanted, and I got my piece without corn.

It seems that these vendors weren't taught to understand much more German than the different kinds of food that this combined pizzeria/kebab place sells (actually: sold, as the railway station no longer exists at all).

darkweasel:Once I ordered a piece of pizza at a small pizzeria at a railway station, and added that I wanted the piece without corn...

I am disturbed that one must specifically request NOT to have corn on one's pizza.

Donniedillon:I am disturbed that one must specifically request NOT to have corn on one's pizza.

I must admit that, where I live, the question of whether to get or not get corn on pizza has never actually come up.

Corn is a fairly popular pizza topping in Europe.

I have seen corn-covered pizzas in Italy sold as "American" flavor. They are unaware that we consider this a weird topping. Of course, I have never seen jalapeno peppers as a pizza topping in Italy, so weird is certainly in the eye of the beholder!

Also, I saw some horse sandwiches in Italy that they were calling "Texas" flavor. I've always felt that real Texans would be horrified if they saw this.

Things are equally ridiculous here in the US, of course. The bread sold as "Italian bread" in the supermarkets, the soft white sandwich bread with Italian flags all over the package, is entirely unlike anything Italians ever eat. Our Italian sausage bears no resemblance to anything I've seen there, and so-called Italian soda has no connection to Italy whatsoever, beyond the fact that the flavored syrups are often manufactured there.