While I'm posting photos…

A little puzzle for you:

What’s wrong with this picture?

It’s a page from Shopping with Dad by Lesley Pether, a reader from the National Geographic’s “Windows on Literacy” series I borrowed from the ESOL-HT library.

Spotted the weirdness yet? Have a closer look at this bit:

It may be lost on my overseas readers, but NZers will spot a couple of familiar logos there, for Telecom and NZ Post. The photo could only have been taken in NZ.

That’s not so weird though – NZ has a good reputation for teaching literacy, and our readers are often sold overseas, so it could well be that National Geographic bought the rights to a NZ book.

But look at this bit:

That’s not NZ money. In fact, it looks very much like US currency to me.

Why is someone using US money to pay for something in a NZ shop? Were the photos taken with the American market in mind? If so, why worry about such a small detail as what colour the currency is, but not bother about making sure the logos and products on the shelves would make it look like an American shop?

Oh, and just to add to the confusion, the book was published in Australia and printed in Canada. Truly multicultural!

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5 Comments

  1. There are other things in there that would give it away as not American. The "Vodafone" and "Yabba" ads, for one. And that hat the guy is wearing. Men generally don’t wear hats like that here, especially not in warm weather (as it must be in this picture, since everyone is wearing short sleeves).

    Weird.

  2. RYC: I looked it up online to make sure. If you go to Vodafone’s international web site and click on the U.S. site, it actually takes you to Verizon Wireless, which is apparently a joint venture of Vodafone and Verizon (a huge telecommunications company in the U.S.). So Vodafone basically operates under another name here, and you won’t see store advertisements such as the one in that photo.

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