Maths dunces who don’t make the cut: Haberdashers have to reject nine out of ten applicants because they can’t add up

Andrew Levy:

When the Bamberger family opened a haberdashery 65 years ago, they insisted their staff use mental arithmetic to price up customers’ purchases.
Despite the arrival of calculators, that attitude has remained unchanged over the intervening years.
But now the family finds itself facing an unexpected maths problem – most youngsters it would like to employ are incapable of working out sums in their heads.