Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America | 
| Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $13.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1069 reviews
Sales Rank: 837
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0805063897
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.569092
EAN: 9780805063899
ASIN: 0805063897
Publication Date: May 1, 2002
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Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialized in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity, and verve. With some 12 million women being pushed into the labor market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at $6 to $7 an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet. As a waitress in Florida, where her name is suddenly transposed to "girl," trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire to with rent at $675 per month. In Maine, where she ends up working as both a cleaning woman and a nursing home assistant, she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions such as "Some people work better when they're a little bit high." In Minnesota, she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. She even gets to experience the humiliation of the urine test. So, do the poor have survival strategies unknown to the middle class? And did Ehrenreich feel the "bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, as promised by the wonks who brought us welfare reform?" Nah. Even in her best-case scenario, with all the advantages of education, health, a car, and money for first month's rent, she has to work two jobs, seven days a week, and still almost winds up in a shelter. As Ehrenreich points out with her potent combination of humor and outrage, the laws of supply and demand have been reversed. Rental prices skyrocket, but wages never rise. Rather, jobs are so cheap as measured by the pay that workers are encouraged to take as many as they can. Behind those trademark Wal-Mart vests, it turns out, are the borderline homeless. With her characteristic wry wit and her unabashedly liberal bent, Ehrenreich brings the invisible poor out of hiding and, in the process, the world they inhabit--where civil liberties are often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its reputation as the ticket out of poverty. --Lesley Reed
Product Description
The New York Times bestseller, and one of the most talked about books of the year, Nickel and Dimed has already become a classic of undercover reportage.
Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate strategies for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1064 more reviews...
 Wrong style and downright annoying May 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Rarely do I ever read something that I actually end up hating after one chapter. However, this book was one of the few that does not get a good review from me. I found almost everything about the way this book was written to be absolutely frustrating and downright annoying. The way the information is presented does not fit the content and the author herself came across as conceited and arrogant. There were also parts of this book that were just completely irrelevant to the content and had I been Ms. Ehrenreich's editor I would have had them removed because they detracted from the actual content.
The idea of this experiment, for a lack of a better word, is a novel one and I admire her for actually going through with it. Nevertheless, when she compiled this book far too many parts of it completely bothered the reader. She makes references to her college level education and her PhD as if these things actually matter when working a minimum wage job.
For the sake of keeping this short all I can say is that I was sorely disappointed in this book, as was the rest of my Modern U.S. History class. It could have been a lot better.
 Nickel & Dimed May 5, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This was an enjoyable book to read. Simple and to the point. Barbara really got down into the trenches with America's low paid employees.
She experienced their everyday routines and the headache of stretching their incomes, and gives some insight into the rules and personalities of their boss's attitudes.
Royalties are more than a nickel or a dime May 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
One reason I am uncomfortable with some people in the publishing industry is that I am from a different class than they are. And I don't mean that the way people might think.
Only somebody very self-satisfied with her own status, socially, intellectually and economically, would have written this book in the manner it is written. Many readers, particularly the tens of thousands of college sociology or first-year English students to whom the book is assigned, won't get how ironic and insulting the introduction is (if they read it). There's simply no way to make one of these insider publisher lunches sound like anything other than what it is, a greedy conversation about ego and money. The project, and the book, begins with an arrogant and condescending scheme made to sound somehow "brave" or "noble" -- but only in the eyes of somebody who'd consider working at WalMart, as a waitress at Dennys, or as a cleaning person to be a terrifying prospect. Think about that -- somebody does have to work at WalMart. We can't eat at Dennys if nobody waits tables there. People are willing to pay to have their houses cleaned and it is work that many have done over the years to support themselves and their families.
Bottom line, this author is far too self-satisfied, and has the typical successful "author's ego," to write an effective book about real people who are struggling to get by. It doesn't matter what she says. This book was meant to espouse a political philosophy, and it was meant to embarrass major corporations or even small employers who treat and pay their employees poorly. In the process it made all of the people covered into ciphers - often she didn't even bother to mention the people's names and seldom got into too many details about her co-workers. It's unwise to humanize people, I guess - but I know better.
I am a writer. It's clear that this author can't humanize the people who truly work at these low-wage jobs, because it isn't in her. To this author, "ideas" and "political convictions" are more important than people.
And that is the value discussion here. Students are largely taught that political decisions will solve people's problems. They are told to read this book, despite the fact that the author can barely be bothered to name many of her co-workers, and as the book goes on, is less- and less- interested in them than in documenting the little slights she endured along the way, and minor hardships (pee in a cup, take stupid test, get treated like you might steal the merchandise, hurt feet, walking to/from work - IMAGINE THAT!).
A better book for students to read to make them think about values, culture, and materialism is Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer. That story, by a writer of infinitely more insight, talent and empathy, telling about the amazing journey and thoughts of Christopher McCandless, will give a different view of the world.
This is the basic circumstance: When people give up control of their minds and lives to any ideology, they lose the most precious things they have: their individuality and right to self-determination. It is not that WalMart (Dennys, Merry Maids, etc.) are, or are not evil and must be shut down and combated. If you truly think your life-purpose is best-served by ranting against any big corporation, or if you think "political philosophy" takes the place of experiencing life, then what have you learned? In which world can you name any activity where you appreciate and have benefited from any outside organization (government, employer) telling you what to do and how to do it? At best, there are things where we all know we need to follow the same rules if we want to participate.
I think this book is actively harmful to people working at lower-wage jobs. I think it dehumanizes them and uses them as pawns. The complaints of the author about her own issues such as peeing in a cup or having an insensitive boss who didn't care whether she was at work or not, are so trivial compared to -- victims of crime, victims of sexual harassment, the laid-off, the injured-on-the-job, and so-on.
But that's the thing, isn't it? That is a value system. Where every individual person is dehumanized except the powerful person trying to tell others' what to say, think or so.
Think for yourself. Don't take your "wisdom" from an arrogant semi-intellectual who couldn't even spend 3 weeks on any one of these jobs before quitting.
 Good Book for those thinking about college April 27, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I think that this book is a must reead for those who are trying figure out if they should go to college or not. It give a very good picture of how it really is when you do not have higher education.
Good Message, Bad Tone April 15, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Barbara Ehrenreich took on the ambitious task of going undercover as a low-wage worker. She wrote this book to explain how people who work for minimum wage get by in America. However, I found this book to be unrealistic, anecdotal, and pessimistic.
Barbara Ehrenreich is an acclaimed writer for her books and articles in magazines such as Time and The New Republic. She got the idea for this book during lunch with her editor. They were wondering how people could live on minimum wage, and they decided that going undercover would be a good way to answer the question.
The first job that Barbara took on was as a waitress in Florida. She received just $2.43 an hour plus tips, and she found it very hard to live. She took on two jobs for a short period of time, but she had to drop one because it was extremely physically taxing. She got overwhelmed with keeping up rent, and one day, she got up and left for Maine. In Maine, she worked as a housekeeper on weekdays and at a nursing home during the weekends. The housing situation was probably the best here, but she had to work hard to make a living. As a housekeeper, she was constantly in pain and undergoing strenuous work. One woman who was pregnant and had a broken ankle had to continue working so she could have a roof over her head. The management in Maine disgusted Barbara. Barbara also worked at Wal-Mart in Minnesota, and she found the working conditions to be very poor. The housing situation was very difficult in the region, and Barbara quit when she couldn't find an apartment.
This book really helped me to value the importance of education and acknowledged the problems with low-wage jobs. On the other hand, I do not think that the author accomplished the initial point of her book. Barbara used a lot of sarcasm and had a pessimistic tone often in the book. She focused more on the poor quality of her jobs, rather than the economic aspects and how she financially made a living. Her tone can be taken as offensive in some parts of the book, especially when she made references to religion and abortion, which are both sensitive topics to many. Overall, the book was a good idea, and had a good message, but the tone in which it was written was not satisfactory.
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