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Barbara Ehrenreich

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Paperback – May 1, 2002

by Barbara Ehrenreich (Author)

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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.

Print length

240 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Holt Paperbacks
Publication date

May 1, 2002
Dimensions

5.92 x 0.69 x 7.78 inches
ISBN-10

9780805063899
ISBN-13

978-0805063899
Lexile measure

1340L
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Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

This exposé puts human flesh on the bones of such abstractions as "living wage" and "affordable housing." Ehrenreich worked, for a month at a time, at "unskilled" jobs—as a waitress and chambermaid in Florida, a housecleaner and nursing-home aide in Maine, a Wal-Mart clerk in Minnesota—to report on how people survive on wages of six or seven dollars an hour. In an easy, conversational style, she brings us the daily life of the working poor and shows that their diligence and good nature cannot earn them a place to live—a social worker advised Ehrenreich to move to a shelter—or medical or dental care or, in some cases, enough to eat. In her last chapter, Ehrenreich suggests that the working poor are "the major philanthropists of our society," sacrificing their families, their health, their privacy, and their leisure so that the rest of us can live more cheaply and conveniently.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Review

". . . you will read this explosive little book cover to cover and pass it on to all your friends and relatives."
--Diana Henriques, The New York Times [Business Section]

"Jarring, full of riveting grit . . . This book is already unforgettable."
--Susannah Meadows, Newsweek

"Angry, amusing . . . An in-your-face expose."
--Anne Colamosca, Business Week

"With grace and wit, Ehrenreich discovers . . . the irony of being nickel and dimed during unprecedented prosperity."
--Eileen Boris, The Boston Globe

"Ehrenreich is a superb and relaxed stylist [with] a tremendous sense of rueful humor."
--Stephen Metcalf, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Barbara Ehrenreich . . . is our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism."
--Dorothy Gallagher, The New York Times Book

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0805063897
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Holt Paperbacks (May 1, 2002)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780805063899
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805063899
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1340L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.92 x 0.69 x 7.78 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,203,198 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #790 in Labor & Industrial Economic Relations (Books)
- #817 in Poverty
- #2,086 in Economic Conditions (Books)

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Barbara Ehrenreich

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BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. She lives in Virginia, USA.

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3 star		9%
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Top reviews from the United States

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Sally Huntington

Minimum wage workers trapped In poverty

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 6, 2022

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Interesting read. The author spends time in various areas as a low wage worker struggling to find affordable housing & food. These people are not lazy, often working multiple jobs & falling further behind. Just one small upset like a car breaking down can put them on the streets

One person found this helpful

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Lesdes

A captivating undercover exposure of the depravity of justice and ethics in our sociey.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 27, 2022

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Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich relates her experiences on the work force in three different states and she opens a clear window onto the struggles of the restaurant, motel workers and store clerks. She works undercover and leaves temporarily the comforts of a life as a journalist and author to join the work force. She relates the financial woes that she lived, and of those fellow workers who provide the essential services that the rest of society enjoys. Except for the last chapter that is a scholarly and thoughtful evaluation of her experiences, the book reads like a diary and is written with passion in which she describes what at times seems a certain sense of self-deprecation and helplessness of the workers before their employers who remain so often insensitive to their daily needs. Ehrenreigh also expresses a unique empathy for the daily battles that she had to endured like those of underpaid and exploited fellow workers whom she encounters along the way. A must read.

5 people found this helpful

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Allison Brooks

Re-read and still an amazing book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 3, 2022

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I read Nickeled and Dimed years ago and recently picked it up again. It's still a riveting read, and (sadly) many of the factors she wrote about 20 years ago are still fully in play in the American workplace. Highly recommend.

One person found this helpful

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Dave M.

Amazing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 28, 2022

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I heard about the authors passing and this book was mentioned as one of her outstanding works. It's an amazing story that informs how so many people struggle to make it day to day even though they are working harder than most.

2 people found this helpful

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BeachShamus

ONGOING PROBLEM THAT HASN'T CHANGED FOR 20+ YEARS!!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 22, 2022

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Our way of life in American where the working poor can't get ahead is chronicled in the book. Even though it was written 20 years ago, it is still compelling and so true. The problem has never been solved. And it really doesn't matter if you have an education or not.

One person found this helpful

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Roger D. Curry

As Important as Black Like Me

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 23, 2002

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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 need
One 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.

65 people found this helpful

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Belinn

More true than ever

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 12, 2022

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This book is a classic, but age has not made it less valuable. It is sometimes hard for people with better jobs to understand how close to financial disaster many fully employed people are living. This book does a good job of both explaining, and showing, the challenges that minimum wage workers face.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Janie U

Thoughtful account of what it is to be "working poor"

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 2, 2015

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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.

10 people found this helpful

RYAN FIENNES

Picador Modern Classic edition

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 7, 2021

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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.

One person found this helpful

Charles

Depressing But Importand Read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 19, 2013

Verified Purchase

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.

4 people found this helpful

Mr. Cwp Keyes

Down but not yet out

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 8, 2012

Verified Purchase

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?

One person found this helpful

johnny

Great informative read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 25, 2014

Verified Purchase

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.

One person found this helpful

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