Nickel And Dimed Reflection

“How to (not) get by in America?” That is a question we’ve all wondered and seemed to find the answer to whilst reading Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. In this novel, Ehrenreich breaks down her adventures as a low class, low income worker and all the things she must do to survive in such a demanding economy. Each journey throughout this book was broken down into three main parts. Firstly, we take a stop in Key West, located at the very end of Florida. From personal experience, Key West isn’t a place to live when you’re living on your very wits end but somehow, she makes it work. We see her take life into her own hands when she picks up a job as a waitress in town.
Beginning in Key West, Barbara finds a decent apartment for a semi decent

price. Working these low wage jobs became a reality for Ehrenreich and she discovers that living this lifestyle can be impossible. Only making $2.43/hour for this waitressing job isn’t going to help the way she wants to live. During this time, she must learn how to adjust. She quickly becomes close with her coworkers and starts to know regular customers so she feels like she must do her best as possible to make it. Whilst conducting some experiments, Ehrenreich offers a survey to some of her coworkers and it just goes to show how hard it is to maintain financially stable while only receiving lower than minimum wage. The differences between the life she was living versus the life she’s living now has become more prevalent. You always have to make a choice between wanting to eat a decent meal at night or having enough money to afford rent that month.
Moreover, Ehrenreich realizes how difficult this is going to be and decides to get a second job. Getting another waitressing job became difficult and she had to make a choice. Hearthside was a comfortable place to work at however, although Jerry’s is harder to manage, the pay is better. The choice was obvious and Ehrenreich left hearthside. Doing so, she decides to move closer to Key West in efforts to save gas money. Furthermore, she decides to get another job which doesn’t last long. Jerry’s became somewhat impossible to manage and she decides to leave there as well. In this chapter, we learn from that living as a low-wage waitress is harder than it seems.
As we read more, Ehrenreich moves to Maine whilst continuing her journey through the low-wage work force.

Here we find many English-speaking individuals and an increase of available jobs for her to work at. Ehrenreich finds it difficult to secure a place to stay until she comes across a cottage for an immense amount of money. Although this place might be a little out of her price range, she decides to take it anyway when she realizes she can’t afford to pay $59 a night for a low-quality hotel room. Moving forward, Ehrenreich begins her job search once again and finds herself serving food in the nursing home. This job is a lot better than waitressing, however, it became a little bit more demanding in the physical aspect. Working with the maid service became somewhat exhausting and she learns that the service is charging the customers more than they pay the employees which seems to put a damper on the work she’s doing. Throughout this chapter, she becomes accustomed with the maid lifestyle learning the do’s and don’ts of cleaning. For example, she’s only allowed to use three rags throughout the whole house and clean the floors on her hands and knees when a mop can do the same. She continues to learn lessons on what it’s like being underprivileged in America. When she develops a rash all over her body, she goes through many setbacks including financial

ones.
Firstly, her rent was higher than she’d thought it’d be since it’s still tourist season and she used up most of her money to pay for her rash medicine. These events led up to Ehrenreich getting frustrated over the way the manager of Merry Maids treats his employees. She goes forth in letting the supervisor know how she doesn’t appreciate the way the workers are treated and instead of getting fired, she receives a raise. He begins to let her know that he isn’t the bad guy in this situation. On her last day of work, Ehrenreich tells the women about her Ph.D. degree and lets them know her plans to write a book. When she asks the women how they feel about working for high class people one woman specifically explains how this empowers her to do better.
This chapter was eye opening and as a reader, I realize, through Ehrenreich’s perspective how the poor are looked down upon in the public. We also noticed how hard it is to be a part of the low-wage working world. Not only will the work be extremely exhausting but you have to deal with the reality of having many people relying on you for simple needs like a place to say or food on the table.
In addition, chapter three consisted of Ehrenreich moving to Minnesota spontaneously. While staying there, she lived in her friend’s apartment until she found herself a place of her own. She then goes on a restless job search and encounters a position that offers her $19 an hour. Although she has this position lined up, she also has an opportunity to work at Walmart and becomes conflicted between the two. However, she ends up picking the job at the local Walmart but is disappointed because she’s only making $7 an hour. Ehrenreich eventually finds a room to rent in Clearview and although the rent is steep, Barbara looks for a second job to cover the cost of living there. Working at Walmart becomes an annoying task and she begins to hate the customers at the store. In every place Barbara lived in, she tried her hardest to make ends meet. Whether she stayed in a shelter, didn’t eat dinner that night or couldn’t afford medicine for something, she tried her hardest to survive.
In the last chapter, Ehrenreich begins to evaluate how well she did in each city she lived in. She goes forth saying, “In Portland, Maine, I came closest to achieving a decent fit between income and expenses, but only because I worked seven days a week” (Page 197). She realizes that the only reason why she could afford to live a decent life because of how many days she worked a week. Not everyone is as fortunate as she was. Whilst being in Minneapolis, Barbara comes to the realization that even if you have all the necessary ingredients to live a semi-decent lifestyle, you still can’t support yourself due to the rent being too high. Ehrenreich quotes “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” (page 199).
Ultimately, the working-class citizens of society deserve more recognition than they receive. The “poor” do the best they can to make ends meet and Ehrenreich displays this perfectly in her novel.