Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (20th Anniversary Edition)

We often think that we deal in reality and misery, with weighty decisions. But our "reality" is so far removed from the lives of lots of our fellow citizens that the description of their lives in Nickel and Dimed will seem as foreign as a National Geographic special.Nickel and Dimed is written by a journalist who took a year "off" and joined the entry-level working class as a full-fledged member. She became one of the people who work at the McDonalds and the Wal-Marts, and who are so frequently lampooned with the snooty "and do you want fries with that?"dismissal. They are, in short, the people who do a lot of the dirty work in the bowels of our body politic.This is a disturbing book. It's meant to be. We can justify (or rationalize) ignoring its message by focusing on the law and on our "business." But we should listen to Jacob Marley: "Mankind was my business!"The author begins with a premise that seems to make perfect sense: "In the buildup to welfare reform, it was uniformly assumed that a job was the ticket out of poverty and that the only thing holding back welfare recipients was their reluctance to get out and get one."The author's travels take her to Key West, Maine, and Minneapolis. She works in restaurants as a server, where this 50 year old Ph.D. is called "waitress" and occasionally is demoted to "girl." She works as a "dietary aide" in the Alzheimer's ward of a nursing home, where her job is to single-handedly ensure that dozens of incompetent old people are well fed, that the dishes are sanitary and that no mistakes - like a sugary sweet on a diabetic's tray - endanger her charges. She works in the "soft-lines" of a Wal-Mart, where her primary job is to pick up after clothing shoppers who don't return items to the racks. Finally, she signs on with The Merry Maids, one of the leading housecleaning franchisers. There, she cleans other people's houses - and their toilets.The importance of this book is its new perspective on poverty. Just as John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me shocked a nation of readers with an inside view of racial segregation, Nickel and Dimed is one of the first inside views of the working poor. Generally, the poor don't speak with their own voice - they just have non-poor people who speak for them with (I think) the very deepest of good intentions. Those "in the pits," though, the soup kitchen servers, the rescue mission pastors, the low-end housing providers aren't writing books and speaking out - they're too busy sandbagging against the overwhelming floodwaters of human needOne reviewer compares Ehrenreich to H. L. Mencken. She has the scalpel of Mencken, to be sure. But she also takes a heavy, blunt object to traumatize apathy to these neighbors of ours. Nickel and Dimed is full of enduring images: the vacant stares of nursing home patients wearing only their adult diapers; the pregnant housecleaner who gets faint every afternoon from inadequate nutrition; and the three kinds of [feces] stains in a toilet bowl. When asked if a particular middle class family is rich, one housecleaner replies, "If we're doing the cleaning, they're rich" And the cleaners sometimes seem grateful to be wiping up after others: "After all, if there weren't people who have far too much money and floor space and stuff, there could hardly be maids." Nickel and Dimed drums away on the class theme that we seem only comfortable with living, not talking about. But what we have done as a society is what authorities as far apart as George W. Bush and Jesse Jackson say that we never can do - we have left these people behind. "I've noticed that many of my coworkers [at a Wal-Mart] are poor in all the hard-to-miss, stereotypical ways. Crooked yellow teeth are one sign, inadequate footwear is another."Ehrenreich finds both cruel irony and indignity in the Wal-Mart experience. There, the "family" of employees come and go through a revolving employment door. If someone is lucky enough, they may get to stay long enough to have management lead The Wal-Mart cheer: "Give me a W . . ." Well, there's the indignity. The irony comes about from employee functional poverty in the midst of the retail Mecca. The sales people have to wear (and furnish) shirts with collars. Ehrenreich describes a co-worker waiting, waiting for a $7 shirt to be "clearanced," because "At $7 an hour, a $7 shirt is just not going to make it to my shopping list."There's no Potemkin-like call to action in Nickel and Dimed. It's "just" an accurate portrayal of the way millions upon millions of people live. As we play our games of golf (which I love), and eat regularly at T.G.I. Fridays (seen by the $7 an hour crowd as an impossible luxury), we can and we do forget the hopelessness of working poverty."If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?" I think it does, for the poor and the not-poor. And that may be the saddest thing about life today under our American flag.

This was the first Barbara Ehrenrich book I read, and it will probably be the last. I am concerned about matters relating to America's working poor and was drawn to the book because I thought it might provide some insight about how people really can live on the income low-wage jobs provide. The last time I worked a job that came close to minimum wage was a number of years ago, and back then I was in college and had campus housing, student loans etc. as a backup. There are many people in the U.S. trying to subsist on low wages, and I thought maybe this book would help me understand what they're going through and what they need to better their situations, so that I can use that information in my own advocacy.Instead, I found that this book is mainly about Ms. Ehrenrich and her prejudices, insecurities, and snap judgements about people. Other reviewers have said the same things, but my biggest problems with the book were:- The whining. This woman whines about everything. The work is physically hard. She's tired at the end of the day and her clothes smell bad. She doesn't sleep well because she's petrified of someone breaking into her room and stealing her laptop. She gets a skin rash and it itches, so she calls her "personal dermatologist" (must be nice to have such a thing) and gets help. Waaah, waaah, waaah. I really wished she had spent more time talking about social impacts of working poverty, or the experiences of the people she worked with who were TRULY poor, than whining about her own discomfort.- The fact that she regularly took "breaks" from her experiment back to her old life, and she continued to access financial and other resources during the experiment. That's not a luxury the real working poor have - to just step away from their life whenever the going gets tough. The fact that she did seriously undermined her experiment.- The fact that she just doesn't seem interested in working that hard, or doing things that may be unpleasant. I think this, more than anything else, showed Ehrenrich's true colors as a privileged middle-aged woman who has very little capacity to understand the very people she's writing about. She's shocked at how dirty the kitchens where she works are, and how the smells of the restaurant "cling" to her when she gets home. She gets unreasonably angry when patients in a dementia unit throw food at her (hello, the patients have DEMENTIA, they aren't doing it on purpose). Cleaning houses is nasty because you have to deal with cleaning up people's body hair and bodily waste. Her shifts at Wal-Mart and her job cleaning houses make her tired because she's on her feet so much, and she expresses surprise, because after all, she works out and is in good shape! There were many times during the reading of this book that I wanted to roll my eyes at Ehrenrich's privileged cluelessness. Yes, work is not always easy or fun. What a revelation! You get the sense that not only does Ehrenrich want employees to be paid more for their work, but wants the work these people do to be clean, pleasant, involve no bad smells, and be psychologically rewarding at all times also. Sorry, but the world does not work like that. Ehrenrich works as an academic and author and so it's no surprise she's been shielded from the harsh realities of life, but the whining and hand-wringing she did over her 'dirty jobs' was really over the top, if you ask me.Ultimately I felt the book did a poor job of getting Ehrenrich's point across. What I took away from the book is "poor people have to work nasty, stinky jobs that are awful. Oh, and by the way, they don't get paid enough." As another reviewer mentioned, civilizations are built on the backs of unskilled, low-wage workers, but the U.S. has evolved to the point where we should be able to provide at least a living wage and health care to everyone and bear the costs of those things. But that's not Ehrenrich's issue. She seems indignant about the fact that people have to serve food or clean houses or stock retail shelves AT ALL and seems to believe humans should not be subjected to such indignities. What Ehrenrich would have those people do for money instead, I am not sure, as we can't all teach in private colleges and write books for a living. There will always be services that need to be performed and a need for service workers, and many times the same people working service jobs are the same people CONSUMING services from other service workers, something that Ehrenrich completely ignores - in her world, only overprivileged yuppies or fat white people consume services like restaurant food or discount store clothing. Ehrenrich would have done better if she cut the whining in this book in half and focused more on the economic realities of the poor. As it stands, she just ends up reinforcing the conservative idea of "the liberal in the ivory tower" and does little to advance concerns about the plight of America's working poor.

This book has forever changed the way I see the poor. As someone who has worked in many low wage jobs, I was not completely shocked by her accounts. However, I come from a family who has wealth. Even though I have chosen to work in lower paying jobs to supplement my husband’s income, I have never been in the position so many of these workers are. It makes me sad I didn’t have more perspective while I was working with these people. Because of parents that are well off, I have never had to want for anything or been afraid I can’t pay my bills. I live in a beautiful, comfortable house. I take my kids on vacations. I feel so fortunate to have the life I do after reading this book. Even though my parents are well off, my ancestors were not. Part of the reason I do not struggle today is because of the hard work, luck, and whiteness of the people who came before me. I feel an obligation to go without a little more, volunteer more, and donate more to the poor. I am also a hairstylist (where I actually make a good living), and I am now offering a discount to anyone in the service industry as a client. It’s not much, but I feel I owe people something for the privilege I have been afforded. I am so incredibly lucky to have what I do, and I hope to never take it for granted again. I also plan to write to my legislators, as well as tip heavily, and always be kind to any service worker I come across. Our country needs a huge change and a wake up call. I am hoping with the Great Resignation it is coming.My only complaint is that this author at times comes across as condescending, and it’s clear she has come from even more privilege than me.

This book is viewed as an undercover expose to most who will read it but is, in fact, just an account of normal life for many, many more who won't even know that the book was ever published.The author is a writer who decided to live (by working) on minimum wage for a while. She moves state, finds housing, finds a job, settles into a routine then moves on to start again elsewhere.It's an uncomfortable read with a vague feeling of the author staring at humans from a different species - most readers will never have experienced conditions in which low paid workers live and, whilst it's very difficult to admit to, there is an underlying feeling of looking through the bars into a zoo. As she gets to know her coworkers at each company and the group is humanised the authors approach softens - a major breakthrough being the acknowledgement that we all want to be appreciated regardless of money being earned.The author appears to be outraged by the conditions suffered by low paid workers and, as this book is intended to stir up some opinions, then this is entirely appropriate but I'm not quite sure that she should be outraged. How does she think people live on $7 an hour? It's not news that life is impossible on these rates of pay but what is the most engaging element of this book is the insight about the individuals she meets during her travels. Many people generalise the "poor" and these book turns the group into people, promoting an urge to thank waitresses more regularly, smile at check out operators and maybe even just notice maids!I found the authors attitude a little self righteous but have to admire her greatly for going out and finding out what is actually happening rather than just listening to others.A criticism would be that the book was published in 2001 and has not been updated since. There is little reference to welfare available in the states that she visits and I would have been interested to know what the position was then and is now. I feel more reading coming on!This book made me think .... a lot.

I purchased the Picador Modern Classic edition; and am very pleased with it. These editions are compact hardback books - smaller than the average paperback. The print may be too small for some, but I haven't struggled with reading it; and due to the size of these editions, they are easy to carry and read anywhere.

Both England and America have a phenomena know as the working poor, these are people that work one or more jobs yet still cannot make ends meet.This book was written by a journalist investigating what's it like to be a low pay worker in America.The author took various low paying jobs and tried to survive on the wages and had a very tough time.Jobs such as cleaning turn out to be very demanding physically leaving the workers with permanent damage to their bodys. The cleaning company charged $25 per person hour but only pays the worker $6.65 per hour.The high cost of housing and low pay means workers cannot just give up their current job and look for another as they will not be able to pay their rent while looking for a job.Other low pay workers cannot afford health care to fix heath problems, the health problems then cause them to lose their jobs and get even poorer.Poor public transport in many parts of America means if you cannot afford a car you choice of jobs is limited to your local area only making the choice of work for the poor worse.It comes obvious that been poor in America actually traps people when vital needs such as health care and transportation are only for people that can afford it. No wonder social mobility in America is so bad and the poor have decreased in wealth in the last 30 years while the rich have gotten even richer.

This book is full of interesting observations about the underbelly of working America that perhaps we in Britain do not even imagine exists. Novelists like Alison Lurie and Richard Ford have dropped me some literate hints, George Orwell covered similar ground in 'Down and Out in London and Paris' and anyone who has ever worked in catering or been a poor student will go 'uh huh' at some point but 'Nickel and Dimed,' which cost me just one U K penny to buy, really tears the lid off the can marked 'opportunities in the land of opportunity.' China has its problems, privatised higher education for millions with no jobs to go to anyone? Europe seems to have over fattened itself, non-sustainably in some areas and as for everywhere else, well just don't expect America to be any better, unless you have plenty of money of course. I urge you to buy and read this book but for goodness sake don't show it to anyone who works at Wal-Mart, okay?

Even through is about a decade old, the experiences Im sure are no different if repeated today in the USA or UK to a similar degree.It opens your mind to something you could always see, always knew was there, but somehow failed to grasp, accept and appreciate.It resonates in the UK with the Zero hour contract that puts all power into the hands of the employer and appears in most cases to be used to keep the workforce subservient (Im sure in limited cases zero hour contracts are great).Highly recommended read.