[Z]

I don't disagree with your point Vicky but having been a foreigner living in another country and not being too confident in my language skills to just approach someone working in a shop for help, I was always grateful if someone could speak to me in English if I got stuck. I would go into a shop having looked up all the vocabulary I thought I'd need, but then, as is always the case in conversations, unexpected questions come up and suddenly you're flustered and have no idea what to say. Of course this story seems ludicrous, but if there's a significant Chinese population coming to shop in that branch of Body Shop, then I'd say it's actually a good thing that they were looking to recruit someone who could speak a Chinese language in order to provide a better service for those customers. I'm assuming all the rest of their staff are English or English speaking, and presumably the hypothetical Mandarin speaking employee would speak English too, so they would really just be undertaking an exercise in equality... it's a shame for the girl, but turning this into a news story is silly and I think it actually makes her family look a bit prejudiced, whether or not they are I don't know, but it comes across as another 'foreigners are taking our jobs' story.