Rating: 
Summary: Very readable, extremely important
Review: The author drops her writing career and works for a short time in three states as a waitress, a maid (and nursing home assistant on weekends), and a stock sorter at Wal-Mart. It's a sort of experiment to see if she, like the millions of America's poor, can try to make enough on bare minimum wage to pay rent and food for at least a month. While this is hardly a feat of in-depth undercover journalism (Ehrenreich refuses to relinquish a car, quits the jobs after a month or when she has a rough day, and is picky about housing; George Orwell would smirk endlessly), the book more than makes its point. It is simply shocking that so many who work full time, sometimes also having another part-time job, cannot make enough to live alone. That so many of America's poorest cannot scrounge together enough to make a deposit on an apartment, so they live continuously and precariously in motels or other weekly lodgings. That so many large corporations and the vile managerial staff they employ are so devious, truculent, and willing to break the law in their constant degradation of wage employees. Wal-Mart in particular comes out looking pretty bad, the employees can't even speak to each other on the floor; however, maid referral services are also exposed as hypocritical and uncaring. Ehrenreich may not be an intrepid reporter, but she's a fine prose stylist and essayist, and she says what needs saying. Bravo.
Rating: 
Summary: Not even close to "Black Like Me."
Review: ...Ehrenreich does deserve some recognition for what she did accomplish but this trial can by no stretch compare to "Black Like Me" where there were no escapes or refuges while living the life of a black man in the South. Griffen's life was constantly in danger and the human degradation was much more hurtful and complex. I do not admonish Ehrenreich for her mission but I do have a problem with her need to constantly remind the reader of her education and her "fit" body. Her callous remarks about the plus-size women...and people with bad teeth exhibit her need to feel superior by mocking others. These type of remarks lessen my respect for this author in an endeavor that should bring forth humbling admiration as well as respect. Ehrenreich does expose many important problems that low-wage earners have and for this I believe the book is worth it's weight as a paperback.
Rating: 
Summary: The poor are all around-even they don't know they're poor
Review: It's books like these that make a difference, because I've been there. I know what it's like to be poor and I know how near impossible it is to get out of that rut. Before I read this book, I thought I was one of few who experienced not being able to match expenses with income. "Nickel and Dimed" shows I had plenty of company. I enjoyed her writing style, because she gets to the point, and keeps it humorous. I could identify with her humiliating and degrading experiences: Employers and managers that reduce you to feeling like you're dirt, taking drug tests prior to hiring, having to ask to go to the bathroom, not being allowed to take state-required breaks, not being allowed to talk about your earnings with other employees - that being a "taboo" subject, among many other perceptive points. Ehrenreich's experience as a lower-class worker should be a requirement for all you middle-class and upper-class richies, so you see what the bottom rung of society has to put up with. If you don't care about the poor and their condition, you might as well be in Afganistan.
Rating:
Summary: As Important as Black Like Me
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: You've heard it all before-- this time you'll believe it.
Review: This book was very interesting and made for intelligent but easy reading. Though this book is a quick read, it is by no means "light". Barbara Ehrenreich has opened my eyes in a way that the several sociology classes I have taken thus far in my educational career could not. It is easy to ignore the statistics of the "working poor" when they are delivered by a professor or news anchor but to learn the approximate experience from someone from roughly ones own class (social or economic) is truly an engaging lesson. As a woman born into the richest 2% of the country, I am guilty of holding onto the vain belief that there is something fundamentally different between the poor and myself. This belief is only propagated by the fact that the poor are virtually invisible to my peers and me. I now realize that the only difference is very often money and the opportunities it offers. Even if this book did not inspire me to spring into action, it certainly helped me see how truly blessed I am and would be even with half of the luxuries I enjoy. Also, my attitude toward America's poor has, at least, been shaken.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Social Experiment
Review: It was an interesting social experiment and at times eye-opening. But, I wish Barbara made use of public transportation -- which she seemed to shrug off. Automobiles are very expensive, and taking the bus could have allowed her to spend...extra [money] on rent (thus helping her with her housing problems -- especially in Minneapolis). Also, expensive habits like smoking ...do not help a low-income person either -- not to mention increasing the likelyhood for healthcare issues. Overall I liked it. I admire her courage to undertake this experiment and report back.
Rating: 
Summary: Wading thru a sea of commas and punctuation...
Review: The story may be engaging but I couldn't tell. It was very difficult to wade thru the author's incessant use of commas along with a lot of other extraneous punctuation. I counted 5 colons on one page. I don't normally notice grammar, but then it isn't normally so annoying.
Rating:
Summary: The right idea, the wrong writing appraoch
Review: "Nickel and Dimed" confronts a topic that most journalists and writers have ignored - the working poor. It is very difficult to read Ehrenreich's book seriously without feeling a twinge of disgust. In the world Ehrenreich paints, a vast mass of the American public is permanently stuck in a universe where hard work does not equal security, and where this economic reality produces disfunctional families and lives. Ehrenreich does not attack capitalism, but as a solution, points to more progressive countries, such as those in Europe. For some reason, America is behind the ball when it comes to ensuring the well-being of its citizens, and workers enjoy no safety nets when it comes to health care and housing. I can imagine readers from other countries laughing at us in America for staying locked in some antiquated past as the rest of the world sighs and moves forward. While Ehrenreich has a good story to tell as well as the statisical and qualitative data to back it up, she alienates many readers with her crass, left-wing approach. She adds far too many insulting wisecracks, such as her rumination, while working as a maid, about the upper classes losing hair from a certain part of their body. Her comments on religion, culminating with an attack on a tent revival, rivals H.L. Mencken in terms of self-rightous, egotistical bashing for the sake of bashing. Ehrenreich has a very important point: America needs more safety nets to help the workers that sustain our economy. However, she adds too much of her own angry and confrontational personality. Kurt Vonnegut once observed that obscenities serve only one purpose: to give people who don't want to listen to you a good excuse not to listen to you. By dropping even the slightest pretense of objectivity, her message gets lost in the wash. She leaves her book open to too many attacks, communism and agitation being among them. While "Nickel and Dimed" is a book everyone should read, and most would agree with Ehrenreich's basic arguments, too many will be turned off by her near-Marxist ideology. This is sad, as the people and ideas in the book deserve more consideration, and a more impartial spokesperson.
Rating:
Summary: Just the tip of the iceberg
Review: I don't know when I've felt as compelled to write a review for a book as I have with Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed." With the number of reader reviews for this title, it's obvious that a lot of people feel like they have something important to say on the subject of the working poor in America. Other reviewers do make some valid criticisms of Ehrenreich's work -- her unintentional classist remarks and attitudes, problems with her methodology, interpretive shortcomings, etc. But what I want to address are the bigger issues that "Nickel and Dimed" point toward, issues that seem to be either glossed over or missed entirely by a surprisingly large number of readers. Two central themes emerged for me by the time I got to the final "evaluation" chapter of Ehrenreich's adventure as a non-living wage worker. First was the realization that the working poor have become almost totally invisible in American society and culture. Second, and more ominous, is the presence of an overarching fictional narrative about poverty in America that keeps Americans either ignorant of or actually hostile toward the plight of the working poor. Anyone who reads "Nickel and Dimed" and walks away still believing that non-living wage jobs serve as a "step up" into better employment needs to go back to school and learn how to critically think. Jobs like waitressing, retail, fast food, domestic work, etc. are called "dead end" jobs FOR A REASON -- they do not provide the foundation of skills and resources (financial, educational, or otherwise) needed to obtain higher paid positions. In fact, except for students, whose stint as a fast food worker or retail clerk is a resume builder (demonstating youthful responsibility and a budding work ethic), non-living wage work can actually make finding a better job more difficult, if not nearly impossible. People who receive a non-living wage often need to work more than one job to survive, therefore greatly limiting the number of hours they can spend trying to find better employment. (This happened to Ehrenreich herself.) Lack of transportation, appropriate clothing, and child care -- huge concerns for the working poor looking to "step up" -- also makes job hunting more difficult. And have you ever tried to get an office job with nothing but Denny's and Wal-Mart on your resume? What Ehrenreich's book points to is an American plutocracy, where the relatively well-off get better off (because they were well-off to begin with), and the poor stay poor or get poorer. In other words, privilege begats privilege, and being poor gets you more of the same. Readers can be defensive all they want about capitalism, their own personal "success stories," etc., but the fact remains, as Ehrenreich says, that the working poor are literally sacrificing their lives for our comfort and convenience.
Rating:
Summary: Eye opening literature
Review: I absolutely think that everyone should read this book. I was required to read it for school, but actually I think that I got much more out of it than expected. So many times people take what we have for granted. Ehrenreich, did a great job of helping her readers to open their eyes more and to not overlook the lower class of america, or those struggling to get by, but to appriciate them or lend a helping hand. It is a book that promotes national unity and appriciation. Nickel and Dimed is a great book and I highly recommend it.
| 
