I'm going to step on some toes here and I apologize if I do. I AM one of the working poor that she talks about here and I DO believe in pulling myself up and making a better life for myself. But what I want to know is this. Unless you have been where I am, how can you comment? How can you also call her a bleeding heart? Is this a country for the haves only? And the have nots just have not? uhh uhh, I just don't understand. We got an election coming up and some folks are fussing about this country even entertaining about health care for EVERY American. So let me ask again, this country is not for the free and brave but for those who just have it?
Personally, I found the book factual to a point. On what I make, unless the housing is subsidized, I cannot live there. plain and simple. does that make me proud to say? no, just realistic. You cannot make a living, pay bills and rent and eat on less than $1500 a month much less $1000, unless you really got a little someone to help you here. Her staying in a place didn't seem that realistic to me, although she did make some allowances. but then she had to because after all, you just cannot do it on a minimum wage salary unless you have a roomie or man or both. I have read in Donald Trump and Robert Kiyoski's book that the middle class in this country is shrinking and that we as a people should either stay poor, and that is food for serious thought.FOOTNOTE:I thank each of you whether you were with me or not in this review. that is ok. I never got this MUCH reviews on a book that is interesting to say the least. I am still getting by in this country but Lord knows I am working hard to get away from it. thanks again.

WAA, WAAAA, WAAAAAAA...boo hooooo

What was the publisher thinking? Letting a biology Ph.d write an economics book. There are so many economic inaccuracies in this book they are too numerous to mention. The most important theory she mangles is that she thinks wages she should be raised even if there are enough employees to hire at piss-poor wages. She believes that (she eludes to it, but never makes the point clearly) it is the employers responsibility to provide enough wage to make sure everyone is adaquately housed and has non-worker's comp health care...and, if really considerate of his workers, a car.

Well, what kind of person gets hired for jobs that are low-paying. Ones who need a job! What kind of person gets hired for jobs that are higher paying...ones who have prepared for those jobs. It's kinda like Social Security. It was never set up so people could live on it. It was a supplement. These jobs are not careers, but I think many of the people who work them think they are. You better get the employer's buy-in on that theory before you start working in these fields. Is that the employee's problem about this misconception?the employers? the goverments (yikes)? society's?

The purpose or theme of the book is so unclear that I hope the publisher was not meaning for it to be entertainment...or informative. Was it meant to be a thesis on American economics?? People with low-paying jobs should use this book for warmth...by throwing it in the fire.

But maybe IT WAS meant to be entertaining and informative. Then the publisher should have hired someone who is a bit entertaining and/or a little informative.

This author writes this as though nobody who lives above the poverty line has worked a job that supplies the wages to live below it. It is a degrading and demeaning book to everyone who has ever held one of these jobs...and to the ones who currently work these jobs.

I picked this up and read it in one day. I also checked the stats for 2007 since the copyright for this was 2001. It really made my blood boil at times and I have "been there and done that" as an employee. I am currently looking for work and even with a B.A., good paying jobs with benefits are impossible to find. Everyone who reads this will hopefully understand the "working poor" and treat them better.

Ehrenreich turns her gimlet eye on the view from the workforce's bottom rung. Determined to find out how anyone could make ends meet on $7 an hour, she left behind her middle class life as a journalist except for $1000 in start-up funds, a car and her laptop computer to try to sustain herself as a low-skilled worker for a month at a time. In 1999 and 2000, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress in Key West, Fla., as a cleaning woman and a nursing home aide in Portland, Maine, and in a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, Minn. During the application process, she faced routine drug tests and spurious "personality tests"; once on the job, she endured constant surveillance and numbing harangues over infractions like serving a second roll and butter. Beset by transportation costs and high rents, she learned the tricks of the trade from her co-workers, some of whom sleep in their cars, and many of whom work when they're vexed by arthritis, back pain or worse, yet still manage small gestures of kindness. Despite the advantages of her race, education, good health and lack of children, Ehrenreich's income barely covered her month's expenses in only one instance, when she worked seven days a week at two jobs (one of which provided free meals) during the off-season in a vacation town. Delivering a fast read that's both sobering and sassy, she gives readers pause about those caught in the economy's undertow, even in good times.

Dear Barbara Ehrenreich,

How do I resent thee? Let me count the ways:

1. You are a wealthy, highly educated person who went on a half-assed, anthropological slumming vacation.

2. When said vacation was over, you told your coworkers: "Surprise! I'm not a poor person after all! I'm going back now to my comfortable life!"...and then you were surprised that those coworkers were mostly worried about the fact that they'd have to work the next shift with one less person.

3. You also were surprised that the aforementioned coworkers were neither impressed nor appreciative that you turned out to be a wealthy, highly educated person writing a book about how hard it is to be a poor person.

4. You were slightly offended that nobody saw through your waitress costume; you assumed that smart people are visually recognizable, and it didn't seem to occur to you that real poor people might also be smart and educated.

5. The experiences you had while pretending to be a poor person may have instilled in you some amount of sympathy for poor people, but you will never really know what it's actually like to be poor. It was certainly nice enough of you to decide that you shouldn't judge a class of people until you'd walked a mile in their shoes...but you only managed to walk about three paces before your feet hurt and you decided you had seen enough.

A real poor person does not have a couple grand to "start" with, or to stay afloat between jobs, after finding his or her working conditions intolerable and suddenly quitting. Nor does a real poor person, when he or she develops some nasty rash from said intolerable working conditions, have a private doctor who will phone in a prescription for soothing ointment. Since a poor person does not have access to said doctor, he or she has to just suck it up and go to work itchy.

I'm glad that this book might bring some much-needed insight to middle-and-upper-class people to whom it had never before occurred that it's actually really shitty to make minimum wage, that people working shitty service jobs have bad attitudes for very good reasons, that a person can work very hard and still be very poor, and that there are myriad external obstacles that keep poor people from pulling themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps.

What I am NOT glad about is that this could have been an excellent, enlightening book about the less abstract aspects of our country's economic structure...but it was not. Instead, it was just a nauseatingly narcissistic exploration of the author's personality.

What many people seem not to understand is (among other things) that there is not only one kind of poor person (or only one kind of "working class" person), that poverty is not just a condition, but a cycle, and that contemporary poverty is not some ahistorical thing that just recently appeared when people started having poor money-management skills and learned how to make crack. Contemporary poverty is a result of Capitalism, but one doesn't have to be a commie liberal to know that.

Sure, there are many poor people who are crack addicts. There are also many, many rich people who are coke addicts. I'm sure that if poor people could afford real cocaine, they would buy that instead of crack, but alas, good cocaine is too expensive for poor drug addicts who make bad decisions.

People who are not poor make many of the same decisions that poor people do (like acquiring a drug habit, or having children, or quitting a job). One big difference is that people with enough money can afford to make bad decisions.

Another big difference is that your life feels a hell of a lot different when you don't have an easy out. Maybe working as a waitress is kind of fun and interesting and not too stressful if you know you'll only be doing it until you get bored. It's another thing entirely when your only other real, long term option seems to be some other kind of awful service job, and when you know that this is your life, not a break from your "real" job and "real" life. When you feel tired and desperate and angry and resigned all the time, when every day you perform the emotional and physical labor of serving people who treat you like shit and pay you practically nothing, how are you supposed to gather enough energy and hope to seek out a better life? You probably can't. Instead, you probably are going to buy some beer or weed and enjoy the few moments of your life that you can. Maybe that's a "bad decision"...or maybe it's just a survival strategy.

I grew up in poverty and worked minimum-wage jobs for years while paying my way through school. I found this book insulting and privileged at times. It was as if she was on safari observing poor people in their natural habitats. I know Ehrenreich has dedicated a lot of money and time to helping disadvantaged people since she wrote this book, and I know the book raised awareness of the plight of the working poor. Her tone was a little smug for my taste.

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.

Some people apparently don't like this book because the idea of an educated journalist going undercover as a member of the working class living paycheck to paycheck upsets them. Personally, the premise doesn't upset me, I think a book should be judged on the content of the book, not the initial reaction one has to the idea of the book. There are plenty of books in which educated, wealthy authors attempts to portray the thoughts serial killers for shock and entertainment value and no one criticizes that, even though it's far more offensive than someone attempting to portray a hardworking poor person in the interest of social justice. What better way to research and learn about a culture than to live it?

In this case, the book is loaded with great stories, fascinating characters and important information about the topics covered. There are thousands of academic articles and books written about social injustice every year and no academic work I've ever read has ever come close to the impact of this book. It is an extremely articulate and poignant look into the lives of hotel workers, cleaning ladies, retail clerks, a group of people that are unlikely to have the luxury and perspective to tell their story. The author makes masterful use of footnotes citing statistics about the working poor. If you care about people who wash your car, clean your clothes, serve you coffee, wait your tables, this is a MUST READ book.

A friend recommended this book because it was so profound for her. I could see why, but I had a hard time getting past the author’s sarcasm. There was too much of it, and I was assuming Ehrenreich was being sarcastic, because otherwise, some of the things she said were actually quite awful - racist, fatphobic, classist, etc. I realized it was probably because that’s her storytelling style and because it was written over twenty years ago when no one noticed offensive language (ever watch Friends? It’s full of casual homophobia, and Seinfeld was too funny to be considered racist, and yet…).

Also, I didn’t really learn anything new. All she wrote confirmed what I already knew - that it’s impossible to subsist on minimum wage. It felt like when I watched Morgan Spurlock develop liver disease by only eating McDonald’s for a month - it’s not like anyone expected he would finish his Supersize Me experiment in perfect health (that was a pretty good documentary if you haven’t seen it).

Well, I take it back a little. I did learn one thing. I had no idea about these personality tests, which were about as effective as when my boss had to fill out US paperwork when he was being asked to move to the US from Tokyo - all the questions were some variation of, “Are you a terrorist or do you know one?,” (this was after 9/11).

I think Ehrenreich's conclusions are obvious, and I am guilty of benefiting from cheap labor, be it from here in the US or in the manufacturing plants overseas. I worked a number of the same jobs she did in high school. The only reason I was able to get by was because I lived with my parents. I’d like to say I couldn’t imagine people making ends meet as an adult, but I also remember the menial jobs that were the only options my parents had when we immigrated to the US. Maybe they/we made it because we had each other and we had a fairly sizable Korean community for support. I have trouble imagining myself do it as an educated white collar professional. Even today, with all the inflation, every time I go grocery shopping, I wonder how people who make less than I do manage it when I’m basically scraping by and living check to check. So I guess I hate to take back what I just said too in that I really don’t understand how people living on minimum wage are able to live in the US on their own or as parents.

I suppose the book is useful in this sense - making me reflect on my life and views, even though the language is still problematic for me. I would be interested to know if she wrote the book today, and whether today's higher minimum wage rate would make a difference.

When this book came out, I was working in a busy bookstore in a fairly small town. We had a stack of them at the counter, and I read bits on my breaks. While I was glad to see a popular book addressing the problems of the working poor, I couldn't help but feel like she'd taken a vacation in my life and then made a bunch of money writing a book about it, something she could only have achieved because she had already been in a position of privilege. Your average house cleaner, lacking an advanced degree and a publishing advance to live on while writing, couldn't have written it. And while it's unarguably a Good Thing to have anyone speak up for the voiceless masses, did the low-paid workers of America get anything tangible out of it?

At any rate, I was standing at the counter one night when a well-dressed couple came in. The woman pointed at the book with excitement. "Look, honey, that's the book!" she said. "The one where she took all those terrible jobs! I heard she even worked as a WAITRESS!" Her tone expressed incredulous horror. Then, in unison, they both froze and ever so slowly looked up at me. I had on my best customer-service poker face, but they looked mortified and fled without buying anything.

I've had a lingering dislike for the book ever since.

Once upon a time, I was a low-wage worker. I worked long hours in retail for too little pay. Even as a store manager, I made about $10,000 per year in the late Eighties. If I hadn't been able to live with my parents, I don't know how I could have been able to afford rent and childcare, much less food on what I made. Because I was working, I didn't qualify for anything like subsidized childcare or food stamps. The waiting list for subsidized housing was endless. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America explores the world of low-wage workers in Florida, Maine and Minnesota. Surprisingly enough, Minnesota was the toughest place to get by. It sounded almost as bad as California.

While I did find this book to be very readable and was compelled to keep turning the pages, I often found the author's attitude smug and condescending. Her introduction and conclusion were fairly inane and didn't offer any real insight or solutions other than the usual provided by those who neither struggle to keep businesses running with a modest profit nor are caught in the struggle of trying to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. She also didn't look at the feminist aspect of this. Now, I'm no big feminist, but even I can see that the big problem is that the low-paying jobs the author explored were ones traditionally held by women: waitressing, nursing home aide, maid, and retail worker. These jobs are not only low paying, they don't offer much room for advancement or leave them with much time or energy to pursue other options. I don't think she even noticed that she was surrounded with a lot of women and not very many men who weren't making it in America.

3 stars - It was good.

I love the concept of this book and thoroughly enjoyed reading about the author's experiences with going "undercover" to the land of the poor working class. With the current ongoing debate for raising minimum wage to a ridiculous 3-4X its current level, I also found this to be a timely read. The author makes an excellent point in her summary that just because a job is "unskilled" that by no means translates to it being easy. Unfortunately, all of this fascinating material was detracted from by several issues, namely the author's poorly presented illogical arguments (more of a commentary), her prejudices, and redundant preaching for unionization.

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.

1. You don't need a degree in economics to understand that if minimum wage were tripled overnight, inflation would trickle into every consumer product and service, eventually putting the minimum wage earner right back into the exact same financial struggle from whence they started.

2. Something is wrong, very wrong, when with a first world mentality one assumes that it is some sort of a right for every person to have their own car and a dwelling all to themselves. There's this radical idea, called a "roommate", that works wonders and creates economic magic. In my younger years I utilized this amazing formula myself and saw an instant 40% drop in my bills. Brilliant! If people want their own place, they will need to earn that luxury.....and it's not that difficult to accomplish if you choose something other than a "minimum", unskilled type of job.

3. You don't need a degree in economics to understand that a minimum wage job should be used as a starting point, or as a flexible job for teenagers, retirees, and family members looking to supplement the household income. It should not be used as a lifelong career for people wanting any semblances of luxury in life, especially if you are a single parent.

I also felt the author was very judgmental towards overweight people, particularly women. Example: Those of us who work in ladies' are for obvious reasons a pretty lean lot - probably, by Minnesota standards, candidates for emergency IV nutritional supplementation - and we live with the fear of being crushed by some wide-body as she hurtles through the narrow passages from Faded Glory to woman size, lost in fantasies involving svelte Kathie Lee sheaths. She also mentions numerous times that she is frequently looked at admiringly by men, and overall an attractive woman. Now, I am an unusually fit person, with years of weight lifting and aerobics behind me. Even knowing that this book is now 13 years old, I was, shall we say, surprised, when I viewed pictures of the author. I would be interested to know if she still holds her judgmental stance towards overweight people today.

My main complaint with this book was the author's gushing love affair with unionized labor -- an idea she tries to push on numerous coworkers without any explanation of how it would benefit them (if she did, it wasn't included in her book). One could easily use this book as part of a drinking game simply by employing the keywords "union" or "teamster". I would expect less redundancy from an author with her amount of experience and education. Her incessant mentioning of unions brought back horrible memories from the position I used to hold at a unionized hospital. In my personal experience, the union promoted mediocrity and I resented being paid the same as other employees with substandard work ethic. I also resented benefits being negotiated on my behalf, which often traded what I cared about most in exchange for things that did nothing at all for me (typically they were parent friendly benefits). I far prefer to negotiate for myself and have so far always succeeded at negotiating a salary that reflects my merits and work ethic vs being paid an "average" that covers all gamuts. In summary, just know that you will have a lot of pro-unionization forced down your throat and if you are not a fan, eye-rolling will occur. Often. Very often.

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Favorite Quote: I don't know what it is about the American upper class, but they seem to be shedding their pubic hair at an alarming rate.

First Sentence: Mostly out of laziness, I decide to start my low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live, Key West, Florida, which with a population of about 25,000 is elbowing its way up to the status of a genuine city.

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.