Absolutely appalling attitude on the part of the author.

I'll simply cite a few examples, and let you make up your mind:

Pg. 109: "...in a huge, gorgeous country house with hand-painted walls, I encounter a shelf full of neoconservative encomiums to the status quo and consider using germ warfare against the owners... take one of the E. Coli-rich rags that's been used on the toilets and use it to "clean" the kitchen counters..."

Pg. 102: "Gloria sends me to Karen at another... volunteer agency, where I am told... I can pick up a food voucher at a South Portland Shop-n-Save. What would I like for dinner? The question seems frivolous or mocking. What do I want for dinner? How about a polenta-crusted salmon filet with pesto sauce and a nice glass of J. Lohr Chardonnay?"

Pg. 165: "Once I stand and watch helplessly while some rugrat pulls everything he can reach off the racks, and the thought that abortion is wasted on the unborn must show on my face..."

Pg. 62: "Today we will be working the locked Alzheimer's ward, bringing breakfast from the main kitchen downstairs... serving the residents... I rush around pouring coffee... and taking "orders", trying to think of it as a restaurant, although in a normal restaurant, I cannot help thinking, very few customers smell like they're carrying a fresh dump in their undies."

And there are many more like that.

I read this in honor of Labor Day.

"Nickel and Dimed" has been on my radar for years. It's considered a modern classic in several disciplines, including journalism, sociology and economics. Starting in 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich spent several months working low-wage jobs in different cities around the United States in an attempt to experience what it was like to be one of America's working poor. She wondered how anyone could possibly live on wages available to the unskilled, which at the time was about $7 an hour.

In the spirit of science, she set some rules for herself: First, she couldn't fall back on skills derived from her advanced education; second, she had to try to keep the job and not blow off the work; third, she had to find cheap accommodations in each city. When applying for jobs, she used her real name and she described herself as "a divorced homemaker reentering the workforce after many years." She did not put her Ph.D. on the job application, however, and instead only listed three years of college. She did allow herself the use of a car, and she ruled out homelessness.

"The idea was to spend a month in each setting in see whether I could find a job and earn, in that time, the money to pay a second month's rent. If I was paying rent by the week and ran out of money I would simply declare the project at an end; no shelters or sleeping in cars for me ... So this is not a story of some death-defying 'undercover' adventure. Almost anyone could do what I did -- look for jobs, work those jobs, try to make ends meet. In fact, millions of Americans do it every day, and with a lot less fanfare and dithering."

Barbara started in Key West, Florida, waitressing at two different restaurants. In Portland, Maine, she toiled as a maid. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, she was a "sales associate" at a Wal-Mart. In each place, she worked hard and tried to be a helpful and cheerful coworker. Each job had its share of frustrations, and in each job she got a sense of what it felt like to be an "invisible" worker, sometimes degraded and dehumanized.

Besides finding a job, she also had to find affordable housing, which was difficult even with the small amount of starter money that she allowed herself. And if the housing was affordable, it wasn't necessary safe. She stayed at a weekly rental place in the Minneapolis area that she described as the worst motel in the country, and it cost her $255 a week. It did not have secure windows or a bolt on the door, and she slept anxiously, on high alert, every night she was there.

"Sometime around four in the morning it dawns on me that it's not just that I'm a wimp. Poor women -- perhaps especially single ones and even those who are just temporarily living among the poor for whatever reason -- really do have more to fear than women who have houses with double locks and alarm systems and husbands or dogs. I must have known this theoretically or at least heard it stated, but now for the first time the lesson takes hold."

While the book sounds grim, it was an engrossing read. It was fascinating to read about Barbara's waitress experience, her housecleaning and maid service, and the weeks she spent at Wal-Mart.* I raced through it in a little over a day, impressed with the writing and reporting. I was actually a bit envious and wish I had written it.

After her experiment ended, she wrote an evaluation for herself, and while she gave herself good marks for working hard, she admitted she did not do as well in terms of surviving life in general, such as eating and having a decent place to stay.

"The problem goes behind my personal failings and miscalculations. Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high."

The edition I read was published in 2011, a 10th anniversary reprint, which included a new afterword by the author. She wrote that the situation has become worse for the working poor, especially since the global recession that started in 2008:

"If we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions. Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can't afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty -- though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they're down."

There is so much to talk about in this book! I understand why a lot of instructors have made it assigned reading in their classes. It's very discussable and brings up many different issues of poverty, society and economics. I highly recommend it.

Low-wage workers of the world, unite! Or something like that.

*I had waitressing jobs when I was in high school and college, and that work requires so much energy and effort for so little pay that I swore I would never do it again unless circumstances were really dire. Barbara frequently mentioned how grateful she was that her parents worked so hard to help give her a better life, and I felt a similar gratitude to my parents.

I had been meaning to read this book for several years but never got around to it. I am glad that I finally did.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a journalist with a PhD in biology who decided a decade ago to go undercover and see what it was like for those being put off of welfare to survive in a low wage job. In some ways, she cheated. For example, she said that she would use a couple of thousand in start-up money to pay rent and get utilities turned on, use her own car or get a Rent-A-Wreck with her credit card, and admits she had no intention of living in her car or a shelter, riding public transportation or being limited to jobs near where she lives, and no intention of going hungry or without medical or dental care.

In the real world, I wanted to tell Barbara as I read this book, real people don't have a couple of thousand socked away to pay the rent, deposit, and to get utilities turned on. They don't have cars quite often or they have clunkers that are unreliable and they have unexpected breakdowns that they can't afford to repair. In real life, these people HAVE to use public transportation and find jobs near their homes. In real life, people do wind up living in their cars, in a flophouse, in a homeless shelter or out on the street. And oh yes, these people have to go hungry and without medical and dental care because in their real lives, they don't have money for food, meds, dentists, or doctors.

While I wish she had taken it to the limit and hunkered down with the real people living real lives under these circumstances, I am glad she at least went undercover and saw the underbelly of those perky advertisements we see for restaurants, hotels, stores, nursing homes, and maid services that show happy, peppy employees so people can realize the reality. That reality, as Barbara discovered, included having to stay on a job at $2.31 an hour plus shared tips because the manager lets you park the car you live in in the back of the hotel parking lot for free. It includes pregnant women who faint from hunger while trying to carry heavy equipment in a maids' job. It includes the real lives of people most others pass by without really seeing.

I know she wouldn't have done it but I really wish that Barbara had done an updated version in some really hard places like Alabama and Mississippi during the height of the economic meltdown. She wouldn't and couldn't do what so many are forced to do with no other choices.

For those who want to see no minimum wages, no health care program, no social safety net for the working poor, I challenge you to do what Barbara did in this book and walk in the shoes of these people and see how you fare. It might help you do the same as the Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge and learn compassion by walking their walk.

Turned me into a bit of a bore, regaling people with information about how much you wouldn't make at Wal-Mart and how short your bathroom breaks would be, the brutality of minimum wage; what if you weren't smart enough or educated enough to get out of the minimum wage bracket, it isn't enough to support even one person on a tight budget. I was tense the whole time I was reading it and couldn't wait for the author to go back to her upper middle class lifestyle so that I could go back to mine. I think this is an important book and was glad to hear that my oldest son had already read it.

One of the best works of immersion journalism in the last century. It was shocking and urgent when Ehrenreich published the first part in Harper's in the late '90s and it is even more relevant now, as the gap between the haves and have-nots shows no sign of ever narrowing. I know people have their issues with the book, but I don't think you can really argue with the energy and resolve it took to report it and write it.

САЩ е страната на неограничените възможности, нали? Нали?

Далеч не всички хора мислят така обаче и това особено много се отнася до самите американци - не всички, но една определена група от тях (съвсем не малка), която смята, че американското общество е несправедливо, подтисническо към бедните и ако си на дъното на икономическата йерархия няма никакъв начин да се издигнеш, да спечелиш пари и да заживееш нормален живот.

Авторката на книгата се заема да докаже тия свои вярвания, като се опита, в рамките на 3 месеца, да започне от нулата и да се опита да успее да се издигне до що годе нормален живот. Изоставя своята професия, мести се в град в който никой не я познава, почти без пари и се прави, че няма образование. Опитва се да почне някаква смотана работа и да види дали ще успее да избута, да спестява някакви пари и т.н.

За съжаление не й се получава, поради което, разбира се, прави изводите, че бедните трябва да бъдат всячески подпомагани с всякакви правителствени програми, помощи и т.н. за да се оправят в живота.

За всеки, който живее в не толкова богата държава (като мен примерно) и който не е разглезен келеш, опитите на дебела��а, богата лелка да живее "бедно" и да работи "здраво" изглеждат повече от смешни. Да живееш в мотел едва ли е начина да почнеш от нулата, нито пък да успееш да спестиш пари, ако плащаш повече от половината си заплата за него. Маркови полички и блузки не се купуват, ако се опитваш да си беден, нито се яде в ресторанти. И после се чудиш що парите не ти стигат.

Повече от очевидно е, че авторката (професионална писателка, на политически книги със социалистически уклон), използва "експеримента" си само за да пробута поредната доза от политическата си идеология.

Да беше дошла да поживее в България, да я видя.

This is a horrible book. The way the author tries to put herself in the shoes of the people who actually experience these stories is just unreasonable. I am sure nobody would choose to live the way they do if they had the means to have a different life.

The premise was really intriguing, but the execution didn't work. To me there was something unsavory about an educated and relatively affluent woman going under cover to play at being a poor person living on minimum wage so she could write about it.
Others have done a brilliant job of explaining a bit more in their reviews why this was so problematic.

I'm just not moved to write much more except that despite my criticism, this book did make me think about things in a different way, which I guess is not a bad outcome. (For days afterward my husband had to listen to my wild ideas about how to solve the housing problem.)

This book was a huge eye-opener for me. My interest was held throughout the author’s chronicle of her personal (research-oriented) experiments with living off of minimum wage jobs. I would definitely (and have) recommend this book.

Nickel and Dimed is a big departure from my typical reading, even my non-fiction reading. While I am glad I read it, I can't say I was all that impressed. I decided to read it because someone I love is also a low-wage worker who is not getting by in America. I hoped it might help me understand their experiences and their choices a little more.

It didn't.



This book chronicles a middle-aged woman's experiment as she tries to survive in a segment of America that is foreign to her. The plan was to try to make it on minimum wage jobs. She worked as a waitress, a housecleaner, a WalMart employee - trying to live on only what she earned from those jobs. Of course, she had her personal bank account and the fact that she could walk away at any time. She also took breaks and returned to her "real" life. For example, she began the experiment with first and last months rent as well as a thousand dollar cushion - something most low wage workers never have. She states quite plainly that she knows she is not in nearly as difficult a situation as those she works with. Her point, really, was this: If she, single, healthy, financially secure, loaded with advantages and her PHD to boot, can't survive on minimum wage, how can we expect people with far fewer advantages and more people to support to be able to survive?

When she's not busy navel gazing or self congratulating, Ehrenreich shows compassion for her low wage brethren, but no real understanding of how they live. For example, it drove my husband crazy that she bought an eleven dollar watch battery and that really set her finances back. My husband said that anyone who knew how to live on low wages would have bought a five dollar watch from WalMart instead of putting a battery in her nice watch. Good point. From a scientific or anthropological perspective, the construct of her experiment was seriously flawed. Those are not the things that bothered me the most though.

For a journalist who claims to be a reporter of facts and who certainly uses statistics to prove her point, Ehrenreich was pretty obvious in her bias. She started the experiment to prove you couldn't make it on minimum wage in America. Is it any wonder she proved it?

As the book, and her experiment went on, she began to fail to support herself more quickly with each new job and new location. As those failures mounted, Ehrenreich began to blame the bosses and the system more easily and frequently. I got tired of her tirades against people who hired maids, bosses who expected them to work extra, and especially tired of her WalMart hate. Yes, the system is broken. Yes, we need some useful changes in our nation's policiies. What we really don't need is more whining and raging against "the man". How is that helpful? Perhaps it was not her intention, but it just came across as more self-preoccupied navel gazing. We already read her self-congratulation about working circles around her peers. We heard about how she worked so fast she was able to help other people clean. We heard about how she was so efficient at waitressing that she had to actually do less work so she wouldn't alienate her coworkers. Now we get to hear how her failures to get by are someone elses' fault? Geez! She gave me a headache by the end of the book.

And, don't even get me started on her treatment of the poor she worked alongside. Instead read this review. Carrie wrote is perfectly already. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The book probably earned two stars for the engaging quality of her writing, but I had to subtract a star for subjecting the reader to her tirades and her smugness about personal sacrifices far too often. Wasn't it good of her to live in poverty? In a hotel - on her savings. With a car. I mean, all she got out of it was a New York Times bestseller.

“When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”

The author goes undercover to see if she can make a living on a minimum wage job. Lucky for her, she would have her own job back any time she wanted. So she goes out into the work field but finds out that she and others cannot make ends meet. Food cost too much, rents were too high, and no one can come with the first and last month’s rent. So then she goes out and gets a second job and works 16 hours a day. She still can’t make it.

I have heard people say that these minimum wage jobs are for kids, people who will soon be moving up in the world. Some say they are just for married women so they can make a little extra money, you know go out to lunch with the girls, go to a movie, buy a new pair of shoes. These jobs are not jobs that will help you move up in the world, nor are the jobs always for kids. There are low paying jobs in nursing homes, and even teachers. As I have read recently, teachers can’t afford to rent a home or an apartment in some States. Here in Oklahoma we can’t keep teachers.

What the author found was that some people, if not many, are living in motels, with a friend, or their cars.

I thought of how we need rent control in the U.S. like we had in Berkeley, California when I lived there. I actually thought of a lot of things but I don’t see things changing. We live in a Dickensian society, because the greed in America is such that companies don't care if you have to live in your car, sleep in a rundown motel, or live with a friend. They don't care if you get sick, just be at work. And forget medical insurance, there is none.

Speaking of which, I remember reading how Charles Dickens lectured to people about the poverty, but no one listened. Then he began writing books, and that changed things in England, but I don’t know how England is now. We have new books now, ones like this, but they don’t change a thing.

The author takes you with her on her jobs as she listens to her co-workers and tries to struggle with working a 16 hour day. She tried being a waitress, a maid, and worked at Wal-Mart. And just don’t get caught taking any food out of these places.
As I sat and watched the Republican debates last night and heard how people were protesting outside for the minimum wage to be increased to $15 an hour, I heard one candidate say that if he were president there would be no wage increases, and he actually felt that wages were too high. Well, guess what? He is now our president. I shuttered and continue to shutter. Another candidate suggested $15 an hour. Well, if she couldn’t make it on two jobs, she couldn’t make it on $15 an hour, but at least the candidate had a heart.

I have lost all confidence in mankind to do the right thing. The wealthy seldom do things for the right reasons, not that some don’t help. But human rights have always had to be fought for by the dispossessed and those who were right beside them. Roosevelt had no plans on helping the poor until the Socialist and Communist parties talked him into helping them, telling him what could happen if he didn’t. Since then programs were created, but then the fight began to get rid of both the Socialist and the Communist parties by demonizing them, and then they began chipping away at the unions and the programs that could help lift people out of poverty. Get rid of a good education as well. An educated population is a danger to society. And now the Democrats are said to be evil communists by those on the right. I remember a woman that I was acquainted with telling me that Democrats were not Christians.

So what does it mean to not be getting by to this author? She means that you can't afford an apartment, and I don't mean a fancy one, but just a decent one. She also means that you can't get decent food; instead you have to eat prepared junk food because you don't have cooking facilities at the motel or in your car, if you are living in one. She means not being able to get sick without losing your pay or your job, because staying home would put you further into debt, plus it could get kicked out of your apartment or motel room. Forget going to a movie; they can't afford it. Forget doing anything fun. Forget cable TV unless there is one in your motel room. Forget even having a TV. Forget living. Forget trying to move up in the world because you can’t afford to even try since it would take time off your job to even look for work, not that there are a lot of high wage jobs waiting for you anyway.

“There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class — and often racial — prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. But these things cost money — $20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on — and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the 'social wage,' while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. And in the larger society, too, the cost of repression becomes another factor weighing against the expansion or restoration of needed services. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves.”

“But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.”

“Everyone in yuppie-land — airports, for example — looks like a nursing baby these days, inseparable from their plastic bottles of water. Here, however, I sweat without replacement or pause, not in individual drops but in continuous sheets of fluid soaking through my polo shirt, pouring down the backs of my legs ... Working my way through the living room(s), I wonder if Mrs. W. will ever have occasion to realize that every single doodad and objet through which she expresses her unique, individual self is, from another vantage point, only an obstacle between some thirsty person and a glass of water.”

I had to read and annotate this book for an AP English class in High school, and before I tell you about how much I not only disliked the book, but also the authors point of view on EVERYTHING, you must know that I love to read and that it's a rare thing for me to come by a book that I disliked so much I could rip it apart. A book I spent money on, I could easily tear up.

She is so judgmental and rude in this book it's unbelievable.
She CHOSE to give up her "upper class" life for a LIMITED amount of time for journalism, knowing full-well when this is all over with, that she would be making a lot of money- and yet she still complains about EVERYTHING she does. This book doesn't explain the struggles of living on minimum wage- it explains how much this whiny, spoiled woman hates pretending to be poor. This lady thinks she is "oh so superior" compared to everyone else (and by everyone I mean her lower-class companions) that she can't even make friends or keep a friend. Instead she judges everyone she sees for having this lifestyle, huffs-and-puffs in her head, and thinks how she's so glad she's only pretending to have this lifestyle while wishing she could tell everyone "Yeah I'm actually not poor- just a journalist."

NOBODY CARES

It amazes me that she could possibly think so highly of herself that she refuses to even attempt at friends, because she knows that this isn't her real life. She would be embarrassed to be their friends when she goes back to her wealth. She is such a hypocrite about every little thing!

Also there was a certain part in the book that made me lose ANY traces of any IDEAS for respect for her that I MAY have gotten- automatically.
She mentions that she is an atheist, and one night she is bored so she decides to "crash" an event she noticed a church was having.
So, she goes to THEIR church, purely for "entertainment" purposes, to laugh at everyone in her head for believing in a higher power. REALLY? I don't care if you are an atheist, Muslim, Christian, or whatever! Just because you don't agree with other religions, that gives you NO right to go to THEIR property to make fun of them or get a little "laugh". That's so low, and disrespectful. I'm a christian and there're other religions I do not agree with, but do you see me going to THEIR church to tell them they are wrong? To mock them behind their backs and then write a book talking about it?? I may be young, but my maturity level is sky-rocketing next to hers.

I don't care about the big words she uses- ANYONE can do that. If you don't believe it, then go away and mind your own business. It's another thing when you really are considering to go into that religion, but she had NO intentions on doing that, because she is "alwaaaays right" she can never do anything wrong, because she is so perfect! Everything she thinks is true and there's no way around it!
NEWS FLASH LADY- YOU'RE A FOOL.

I'm sorry but this book made me so angry. She had a negative view on everything, she was racist, rude, crude, and most of all a hypocrite. If you're like me and don't like reading books that are all about this kind if character, then don't read this. It was a complete waste of my life.
She doesn't even deserve one star.