Nickel and Dimed
by Barbara Ehrenreich · first published 2001
55% recommend36% neutral10% critical
Why HN recommends it
Undercover account of the author living on minimum-wage jobs, showing how precarious and exhausting low-paid work is and how costly being poor can be. Suits readers wanting to understand poverty.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
The author's experience holding low-wage jobs in three parts of the U.S. in the late 1990s.
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For those who want to read an expose on the nomadic and way underpaid, I'd suggest checking out Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. (actually, anything she writes is phenomenal). This whole living in your car and being nomadic is hardly new to America. I saw it when I was traveling the USA from 2001 to 2007…
on “Living in cars, working for Amazon” ↗I think everyone should read Nickel and Dimed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed) by Barbara Ehrenreich. She goes undercover and tries to survive working minimum wage jobs. I don't think I'm spoiling the book by revealing that she wasn't…
on “Economic Inequality Is Worse Than We Think (2015)” ↗man, i'm actually a huge fan of barbara ehrenreich (especially nickel-and-dimed), but i feel like i could write an article like this about any subject. for instance, here the subject is some people who are trying to be more healthy and take care of themselves. but it's made sinister…
on “Body Work: The curiously self-punishing rites of fitness culture” ↗Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an excellent book, "Nickel and Dimed," on how exhausting and precarious the lives of poor (= minimum wage-earning) people are, based on her experience trying to live off minimum wage. In my life, I have been dirt-poor (homeless) and pretty…
on “Financial literacy is a passport to financial freedom” ↗Speaking of Barbara Ehrenreich, her book Nickel and Dimed is a fascinating study on poverty in America. https://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0...
on “The Disneyfication of a University” ↗…$10hr, in rural North Carolina, so lots of people live on even less. Please research this issue and go and meet people in this income bracket, you will see a different picture. I also encourage you to read Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. The truth is most American's wages have gone to Health Insurance, College, and Housing. See https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/this-chart-i...
on “What If Andrew Yang Was Right?” ↗I've read both The Jungle and Nickel and Dimed, but not Atlas Shrugged. To this day I have never hired anyone to clean my house or fetch and carry for me, it's a direct influence of that book. One day when I'm old and infirm, maybe. On my last…
on “Amazon warehouse workers are walking out and Whole Foods workers are striking” ↗Besides checking being poor by yourself (which will come easy for a lot of people in the current economy), and/or hanging around poor neighborhoods and making friends, I recommend "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed A small road trip in South Dakota, Mississippi, Alabama et al would also be insightful.
on “50% of All Workers Made Less than $26,000 in 2010” ↗…overdraft fees, low-to-zero interest they can get away with, etc. A lot of the biggest, easiest wealth made in America is derived from screwing over poor people at scale / en masse. I highly recommend Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich for some pretty good examples of this.
on “Verizon Up offers rewards in exchange for customers’ personal information” ↗++1 for "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America". A fascinating read, it's the narrative of writer Barbara Ehrenreich as she goes undercover and participates in the minimum-wage economy in the US. It recounts not just…
on “A preview of the U.S. without pensions” ↗Being poor is very expensive, and I think a lot of people have no idea just how crazy and awful finance in small numbers is and what that does to people's lives. _Nickel and Dimed_[1] is oldish, but still highly relevant, if you want to read a depressing book. [1] http://barbaraehrenreich.com/nickel-and-dimed-by-barbara-ehr... https://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0...
on “Why it’s so hard to fix banking: An interview with Simple’s exiting CEO” ↗Programming had much better pay and benefits than most jobs. There is plenty of people who work multiple jobs and still are in awful living conditions. You should check out the book "nickel and dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich Also keep in mind that the author of the article is going to a boot camp. He is not getting paid, but paying. Once he is done he will likely earn ~$100k and can move into better…
on “My life with 12 programmers, 2 rooms and one 21st-century dream (2016)” ↗There's a good book on such jobs called "Nickel and Dimed"[1] by Barbara Ehrenreich, who went "undercover" and worked a bunch of such low-paid jobs. A quote from the book: "When someone works for less pay than she can live on ... she has made a great sacrifice…
on “I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)” ↗…pay enough to afford to pay rent & utilities, buy food, pay off college loans. I could go on. Just saying unemployment is low doesn't capture the nature of the working poor. Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed covers this well. People who work in software and make six figures tend not to be squeezed to afford the basics, except perhaps if they have to live in one of the highest COL cities in the US, but there…
on “The War on General Purpose Computing” ↗…describing. Just to name a few: "Hard Times" by Dickens, "The Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck, "Germinal" by Émile Zola. "Christ in Concrete" by Donato is another one. If you want non-fiction, I can recommend "Nickel and Dimed" by Ehrenreich or "Working" by Terkel.
on “We Are All Animals at Night” ↗