Rating: 
Summary: Enjoying Nickel and Dimed depends on who you are.
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich, with a PhD in biology, seems as if she would be a credible source of information. In this book however, Ehrenreich is very biased. The entire book consists of one view point only, the view point of the upper-middle class. Truly the purpose of this book is to reveal the hardships of making it as a low wage worker in America, but it is written with no compassion. The book can be seen in two forms. First it can be read as a book about a woman who works low wage jobs to expose the poor living conditions of workers trying to make it on minimum wage, and it can secondly be seen as a sort of enlightening. It can cause the "well-off" of America to see what they have actually become. It is definitely a book to read if you have never experienced working in a low wage situation. If you have worked some of the lesser wanted jobs however, prepare yourself for Ehrenreich's condescending comments and her constant complaining.
Another downfall of the book is the perception that Ehrenreich focuses much more on herself throughout the book than the topic at hand.
Rating: 
Summary: Just Awful
Review: A newspaper article "think-piece" parading as a novel, NICKEL & DIMED emerges as a superficial true-life scenario wherein the author, BARBARA, goes "undercover" as a minimum-wage worker in order to discover what it's "really like." Predictably, she discovers that minimum wage work is emotionally humiliating, physically taxing and monetarily paltry. Beyond that, however, the author offers up only stale statistics about the working class and consistently fails to bring her fellow CO-WORKERS to life, though she does complain quite a bit about her own back-breaking experience, one that we know she can leave at any time. Herein, everything's just an excuse for the author to pad-out her "experiences" with redundant, increasingly obvious observations, including the "shocking" revelation that waiting on tables is really hard work. At times, the author looks beyond her own situation to consider the plight of her co-workers, but only fleetingly. For the most part, BARBARA'S CO-WORKERS exist to make real the many statistics BARBARA'S so very fond of quoting. NICKEL & DIMED is well-meaning. The author really does seem aghast that several MAID CO-WORKERS are welfare recipients and frequently smoke only half of their cigarettes during break, saving the other half for later. But the author saves her nastiest barbs for her experience as a sales clerk at Wal-Mart, revealing the retail behemoth as stridently inhuman and cruel. While this isn't any great surprise, it is noteworthy since Wal-Mart is the only place, with the exception of "Maids, Inc." that is named by the author. For reasons that remain unclear, the other restaurants and jobs she holds are allowed to have pseudonyms. NICKEL & DIMED is not the shocking tell-all expose that the author seems to be going for. After all, any college-aged kid forced to work part-time can tell you that working as a waitress is difficult. And BARBARA'S remaining experiences are rendered in such a shallow manner that they never create the "outrage" she's hoping to elicit from the reader.
Rating: 
Summary: Imagine David Sedaris with a Social Conscience
Review: Having been fairly familiar with Barbara Ehrenreich, mostly through her excellent essays for Harper's and others, I was certain this book would be eye-opening and enlightening. But I was not prepared for how funny it is. Ehrenreich has that rarely seen combination of gifts: social conscience, intellectual depth, learnedness and a riotously funny sense of humor. Imagine David Rakoff or David Sedaris with a lot more learning and a lot more compassion and you get the idea. But her extremely trenchant wit in no way undercuts or trivializes the serious story she has to tell -- of how often working hard AND remaining poor go together in an increasingly inequitable America. As a recently escaped member of the working poor (Getting out was mostly luck, by the way) I can attest that everything she says is true. A wonderful, thoroughly readable and informative book on an extremely important topic.
Rating:
Summary: Informative but lacking in agenda
Review: Barbara Enrenreich, successfully engages the reader in her experiences working in the lower ends of America's wage spectrum. I enjoyed reading this book - the antecdotes are interesting and the conditions of the work place and her temporary residences are relayed with chilling detail. I guess that I have two main problems with the book: first I was mislead to believe that she had lived for years working these jobs as part of her experiment to see how so many American's struggle to stay afloat. However, she only worked each job for a month. As a result, she keeps herself from every truly hitting rock bottom. Not to say that she should have kept up her "practical experience research" of this book until she was living on the streets and pan handling for change, but I think it would have been even more informative had she had to explore the various techniques that the working poor have to resort to to subsit. Secondly, I guess I'm just angrier than her. I'm afraid that most people will finish reading this book with no deeper impression than that they should never hire a maid service because they do a sub-standard job of cleaning, instead of thinking that it is time for America to readdress our economic priorities toward building PROSPERITY (which would be spread out to the most people possible, as a reward for their participation in the economic system) instead of building WEALTH (which serves to redirect the economic output towards the 10% who already own 90% of this country). And since I know that the author shares my opinions about the direction of the American/global economy (from reading other things she's written), I was disappointed in this failure.
Rating:
Summary: A disappointment.
Review: A noble idea, deeply flawed in implementation. Ehrenreich's analysis is superficial and her tone whiny. By the end of the book, you know a lot more about the author than about the challenges facing low-wage workers--and what you know is not particularly flattering. With a great deal of editing, this material might have made a good magazine article, but there's just not enough reporting or research for a book.
Rating: 
Summary: Right idea, wrong voice
Review: I agree that there is a problem in our society when someone works long and hard and cannot get ahead. I agree that single mothers are especially challenged to support themselves and their children against such odds. This book, however, offers little hope and a distorted view of the low-wage worker. Readers would have been better served by detailed personal accounts of workers like those Ms. Ehrenreich encountered, rather than her own temporary experiences. Try as she might, the author cannot adequately express the pitfalls of working jobs at or slightly above minimum wage, because as we are reminded over and over throughout the book, Ms. Ehrenreich can and will escape them.
I found the book to be interesting, entertaining, and irritating. The author swooped into these jobs, complained bitterly about every aspect of the hiring process and job duties, and fancied herself the next Norma Rae among the low-brow workers, then returned to her own comfortable life. While companies like Wal-Mart, according to the author's impressions, may go to extremes to control the thoughts and actions of their employees, Ms. Ehrenreich fails to see the purpose of many legitimate business policies. She also fails to recognize that those employees who have the potential and ambition to move on will. They are not helpless without her intervention. The author perpetuated the "us against them" mentality in employment situations by criticizing every business policy and the role of managers. Perhaps she should have written about some of those managers who work 60, 80, sometimes 100 hours a week on salary, often making less per hour than those they supervise! Or maybe she could blindly hire someone to be her personal assistant and give that person full access to her office and personal property. Maybe the drug use that she trivializes throughout her book would then be of some concern.
Overall, her attitudes strike me as immature and only serve to remind the reader of her priveleged background.
For readers who have never had to work jobs like these, this book may give them a warm and fuzzy feeling of now understanding the plight of the low-wage worker. For the rest
of us, who Ms. Ehrenreich apparently never thought would be intelligent or ambitious enough to have picked up and read a book, it's just plain insulting.
Rating: 
Summary: Like it is...
Review: I used to work jobs like these, and it scared me enough to get me back to college. The author's done a marvelous job of giving us those behind-the-scenes things that many people may not realize. This book does a lot to explain why customer service leaves so much to be desired. It's amazing what people are expected to do for $5.00 per hour.
Rating:
Summary: It works on some levels
Review: Overall, I'm glad I read this book. It's easy to see the poor as one unit of people. We need to be reminded that, although poverty is a social problem, everyone has their own story. Ms. Ehrenreich's style of writing is entertaining and completely accessible. Some of the people she encountered broke my heart. She was able to relay their stories with a refreshing lack of melodrama. And now, the criticism: I cannot support this book as anything more than anecdotal. Her methods of gathering data did not fall into any realm of reality for either investigative journalism or a sociological study. Her story was too personal to be investigative - she spent more time trying to live poor than study the poor. It wasn't scientific - anyone who's taken an Introduction to Sociology class was taught the dangers of 'going native'. Her purpose was to find out if minimum wage (or close to) would cover expenses families might face. She could have found the answer by asking anyone that worked at a fast-food restaurant, mass-merchandise retail chain, or cleaning service. Since she was going to exert all of the time and effort to become poor herself, the book could have been much more.
Rating:
Summary: A glimpse into the working class without being preachy
Review: Ehrenreich should be commended for portraying an honest picture of working for minimum wage (or close to it)...a picture of people who work very hard for not enough money to get by. I think she does a good job of relating her experiences as they happened to her, her emotions brought on by the experiences, and her impressions of her co-workers. In doing so, I was able to understand how frustrating and infuriating it can be to work day after day without the chance to get ahead. And yet, Ehrenreich didn't preach the injustice of this or bemoan the sad lot her co-workers faced. She simply offered her insights and let me make my own decisions. I think she was very honest in reporting that this was a temporary experiment...only a few months in each city/job. That she was more privileged than many of her co-workers and that she therefore could not speak for their lives, but only about her experiences. I love this book so much that after I finished it I bought 4 more copies for my friends!
Rating:
Summary: Workers of the World Unite
Review: The book is a well written account of the author's experiences in several low wage level jobs. Makes you not want to pursue a carreer as a house cleaner, waitress...etc.
I enjoyed ("enjoyed" may not be the operative word ) the book, and underlined a lot to use in discussions with some of my more free market oriented friends. I definitely will always leave tips for the housekeepers at hotels, and urge my friends to do likewise. The author paints a pretty bleak picture of the low income worker's lot in life. I did find the author's tying her experience into her living situations where she tried to make ends meet by leaving in cheap motels kind of a stretch. She didn't need that aspect to paint the picture she was painting. Finally, I think the book is a good reality check for those enjoy their upper middle class lifestyles and just cannot seem to sympathize with those who do have the get up and go to achieve a similar life style for themselves.
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