update: If you are in any doubt as to the facts of how things are for the enormous underclass in the US who makes the profits for Starbucks and Amazon and the rest, try this 'game' and make the daily confronting decisions to try to survive a month: http://playspent.org/

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Consider that this horrifying indictment of American capitalism was published in 2002, well before the dehumanising 'gig' platforms ripped through whole industries, destroying the conditions, such as they were, of their workers. Consider the setting is prosperity, with more jobs (if they can be called such) available than human beings to fill them.

This book generated much interest in the US - Ehrenreich suggests this is because 'one of us', nice white people, faked it for the story. You should read in conjunction with this, Hand to Mouth which is the the same story, but it isn't a story, it's the life of a bottom of the pond worker. Ehrenreich provides a foreword.

For more on Nickel and Dimed start with Wiki.

For an on the ground response along the lines of 'Mr Walmart's nice' see Life at Wal-Mart.

And for a you-might-roll-your-eyes-too 'I did what she did and it was super easy, barely an inconvenience, well on my way to riches in no time at all. Months even' sort of article, there is  this.

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.

I wanted to like this book. I thought the premise was fantastic. But overall, as someone who actually has lived on minimum wage (even supporting a child on minimum wage back when minimum wage was scary low), this book comes up short in several ways.

First of all, Barbara Ehrenreich has a horribly privileged, ivory tower view of how poor people must live. While she does talk to some people who are scraping by, she assumes the majority of poor people make the same crummy decisions as the few to whom she spoke.

Throughout her anthropologic immersion into semi-poverty, she makes choices that the savvy poor (of whom there are many!) would just never make. She eats out instead of picking up beans and rice at the bulk section of the supermarket. She rents a pay-by-the-week hotel instead of asking around for a roommate. It's true that people do make these choices, but the only folks I know in my town who chose the roach motel route were also doing meth or had lousy rental references from too many parties or property damage.

I just think this could've been done much, much better, and it was disappointing. It's sort of like the movie Crash, which I also disliked intensely. A book (or movie) with a message shouldn't bash you over the head with the message. It doesn't need to be over the top to make a point, which can actually turn the reader (viewer) off enough that the message is lost.

Steal this book! The author deserves no royalties. She is condescending, patronizing and proselytizing to the converted. Of course it is hard to make a living on minimum wage. This surprises her? She found it difficult for few months? Try a few years. I’d like to knock that PhD tone out of her voice. This book is so painfully elitist, I had to quit half way through or put my fist through a wall. I decided to keep the bones in my hand intact. Thank God I didn’t buy this book. It was thrown my way by another pissed reader. Well look at it this way—now I have something to line the cat litter box with. I certainly won’t ask anyone else to read it.

I was captivated by this powerful book, and I felt tremendous empathy for the real workers chronicled by this journalist. Good premise for a book: she takes the most minimum wage type jobs and sees what it’s like to try to live in our society, and she shows just how nearly impossible that is. Barbara Ehrenreich is a journalist who can sure write an interesting, and unfortunately sobering, nonfiction book.

From my perspective, Barbara Ehrenreich was preaching to the choir.

All that I read made me want to stand up and cheer.
I didn't finish the book but I am SOOOO glad she wrote every word of it.

Around the time this powerful book came out, I was busy writing, indie-publishing, and spreading the word about a book that aimed to debunk some of the magical thinking at the time (and to this day) about the "Law" of Attraction. Namely, "Magnetize Money with Energetic Literacy."

I didn't want to unintentionally take some of Ehrenreich's language and plagiarize her in my work. That's why I didn't finish the book. I read enough to respect, and admire, her work On (Not) Getting By in America.

First reviewed Oct.1, 2009. I found and corrected a typo...so the dtae changed.


I find sometimes that people are surprised that I would recommend this book (albeit with a couple of reservations). Somehow the fact that I'm a political conservative is supposed to make me unable to identify with low income workers or those called the working poor.

Why? I struggled with long periods of unemployment...with a family. I've flipped burgers in several restaurants and several times. I've worked in family restaurants, fast food restaurants, factories, I've worked part time, temporary and "whatever I could get". I respect and feel for those who struggle against the odds to support themselves and their loved ones.

This book does lay out a lot of the experience. The life of a waitress (who doesn't have to be paid minimum wage because she gets, tips. Of course if the amount of the wages and the tips fail reach the amount of minimum wage the restaurant is supposed to pay the difference. I've never been anywhere the management posted this information or bothered to tell the employees of the fact.)

Read the book, learn the lesson, especially if you haven't been there. It takes a deal of courage and self respect to work at a low paying job and to support your family. If it's all you can get you don't quit, you work and do your best turning in a good job, even in a (so called) menial job.

What are my reservations about the book? Well the author could never actually be what she was going "undercover" to portray herself as. She could always quit and go back to her "real life". This of course slanted her view..and (please forgive me if you don't get this...or if you're Barbara Ehrenreich) it seemed to me that her "voice" was always a bit condescending about the people she was dealing with, the ones she was concerned about. Do these people need "more government intrusion" or simply fairer treatment, a fair day's work and a fair day's wage.

The book holds up an actual view of life even if a bit skewed.

This book is about America's working poor and though I found it interesting it is only a very small window into the lives of these people. The author has many advantages over her co-workers and this shows through loud and clear during her experiment. She also has a somewhat elitist attitude towards those she works with and constantly reminds us of her education and how "over-qualified" she is for many of these jobs.

No doubt, it will surely be an eye opening book for those who have never had the experience of growing up in this sort of situation. For me it was an all too painful reminder of my early years and the horrible job at a fast-food joint where I worked double shifts, was often called a peon by management and went home smelling and feeling like I'd been dipped in the fry-o-later all for a measly pittance. Finishing school and taking a few college courses changed the course of my life but many don't have this option or realize it too late when they're already saddled with children and debt. It's difficult to advance past an entry level job when one needs such luxuries as food and shelter and then if you throw children into the mix things are pretty glum. This author hasn't a clue about the true working poor, she has a stash of cash and car available at all times. This book mainly made me sad, frustrated and aggravated but there were a few moments of light and genuine human kindness that did keep me reading.

In the end this book turns out to be all about one woman's very limited experience as "the working poor" who rushed back to her "upper middle class" lifestyle to make some bucks off of this book. Blech.

This was a very readable, if not particularly shocking exposé of some of the realities of living on minimum wage in the US. I wouldn't have thought it could be all that controversial, but looking at other reviews I see it being denounced as a "Marxist rant" and "condescending slumming" and similar. Which makes me think that most of these people have never met a Marxist, and didn't bother reading Ehrenreich's own contextualization of her experiment and its limitations.

But anyway, Barbara Ehrenreich got a number of minimum-wage jobs around the country in the late 1990s, and attempted to live on the proceeds (usually working two jobs at a time, or seven days a week). She struck out every time, though by her own admission there were some things she wasn't willing to do for the sake of the experiment (endanger herself, live in her car, actually go hungry). The audience for this experiment, which some readers seem to have missed, is not minimum wage earners themselves but those who believe that a job, any job, is the path out of poverty.

As someone who worked minimum-wage jobs part-time in high school and university, I could identify with much of what Ehrenreich flagged as being the emotional effects of this kind of labour (snappishness, seeing the bad in other people, becoming a worse person yourself, as well as exhaustion, stress, poor sleep and bad nutrition). Like Ehrenreich, my own experiences were always with a safety net -- living at home, or at least having the option of moving back home rather than put up with certain abuses. Even so, this brought up depressing memories of micro-aggressions, condescension, lowered self-esteem, customer threats, kowtowing to people who weren't very smart but had been promoted to manager because (this being the only theory that made sense) they were a man, rushing impossibly from one job to the next. After reading this, I'm thankful to at least have had my experiences in Canada and the UK, in decent cities, not hideous soulless big-box American urban peripheries.

And of course, the situation has just gotten worse since 2000.

Read this because it is on the NYT top 100 books of the 21st century and I wish that i didn’t

First, a confession: I met Barbara in New York City some years back and we amiably discussed her books, my classes, and her son, who was about to give a talk on his book on the Middle East. NICKLE AND DIMED is her masterpiece. For one year under disguise, she took a series of minimum wage jobs in the USA, from carton packer at Walmart to coffee and doughnuts waitress. Some of what she found is disturbing: her fellow co-workers were highly religious, mostly apolitical, and many anti-union. Yet none come across as unsympathetic nor does BE weave a political theory of the American working class out of her findings.

This book had actually been on my TBR for ages, but it wasn't until the NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list came out that I actually decided to download it from the library for my #walkntalkwednesdays.

If you are like me and prefer your sociological studies books to be heaped in immersion techniques rather than a bunch of statistics and mumbo jumbo, I wouldn’t hesitate to add Nickel and Dimed to your TBR. While there are certainly gripes to gripe about (mainly in the form of the author conducting an experiment that she can easily remove herself from (and does) when the going gets rough), it is astounding that over 20 years after its original publication date how little salaries have changed while the cost of EVERYTHING has increased so dramatically.

I listened to this one and was fully invested throughout the duration of my daily walks. Highly recommend both Evicted as well as Nomadland if this topic interests you, as well as the film Motel Kids of Orange County for a heartbreaking look at families just trying to get by with little to no chance of ever really getting ahead.