Nickel And Dimed Sparknotes

In the book Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover to report on the true hardships of being a low wage worker. She starts off her investigation by setting rules for herself. She would keep her car, her reasoning being that no one wants to read a book about someone waiting a bus stop. She would also never go hungry, having an ATM card to prevent that if she could not afford it. Another rule she had made for herself was that she was not allowed to fall back to any skills that she had derived from her usual work. Ehrenreich also states that she does not fit the prototype of a low wage single mother because of her good health, means of transportation, and lack of children. Because she is a native and

She soon finds out that the job is more difficult than she had originally thought it would be. She quickly discovers that she needs to get another job, and she takes a position as a housekeeper. After a day she decides it is too much and quits. the next city she moves to next is Portland, Maine where she acquires two jobs, one as a maid, and the other working in a nursing home. Ehrenreich notes how she thought it odd that she was given so much responsibility at the nursing home even with her lack of previous experience in that area. After Portland she moves to Minnesota and begins a job at a Walmart in Minneapolis. She ends up living in a motel for the entirety of her time there, not being able to find an affordable place to live. She concludes that there is almost no way to be working a minimum wage job with no other sources of income and also be able to afford a deposit for an apartment. Overall she states that she thinks she did exactly average at all of these jobs, and she decides if the workers began to overachieve management would find ways to use that against

I think before Ehrenreich first began the experiment she assumed that with her previous education she would quickly be able to grasp any additional information she learned at a new occupation quite simply. She seemed to have an arrogance to the way she talked about the lower class, which is expected given she had never experienced anything like this before. At first she didn’t seem to understand that she really needed to be watching what she spent her money on. She got a job inconveniently located from where she was residing, making her spend unnecessary money on gas, while she was also buying herself 30 dollar pants stating that it was “necessary”. In the beginning of the book she says that her goal is to “see whether or not I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do everyday.” With some quick research I soon found out that she was actually making more than what was considered the poverty level, and without many additional expenses that one in that living condition would usually be paying. It’s skeptical that she was still struggling so greatly while making more than living wage, giving the impression that she may have been inadequately portraying her true experiences to make for a more heartfelt and interesting story. Even though I think there are steps she could have taken to be more accurate, such as not having transportation etc., I still do think the more personal way she described the hardships she