This book tells the reality for too many Americans, who don't qualify for the Bush/McCain tax cuts. Sad, and scary, reading.

I originally read this book when it was first published! I found it hard hitting, have quoted from it frequently and have recommended it to numerous indivduals.
I feel her book does not go far enough because, let us be honest, she knew she would "get out" of the circumstances it was an experiement for her, so that kept her form hitting the despair, total desperation, and fear that her children would never have full tummies; this si the plight of the working poor everywhere in America. To say it is not is to close ones eyes and live in ignorance

The most unsettling aspect of Barbara Ehrenreich's eye-opening foray into the world of the working poor is that the situation hasn't improved. In fact, it's gotten worse. The U.S. economy was booming in the late 1990s when she began her project, working anonymously in various minimum-wage jobs and reporting about the experience. Though she steps in and out of the lives of the minimum-wage workers who befriend her, she is a very powerful, effective advocate for them. In her book, she shows that living decently on about $7 an hour (still the minimum wage in most states) is impossible. However, Ehrenreich gives it a try in three cities, working as a waitress, housekeeper and Wal-Mart clerk. She reports from the front lines, where the working poor eat potato chips for dinner and sleep in fleabag motels, and she does the same. She finds that minimum-wage workers lead a dreary existence, toiling away in obscurity day after day with little hope, just getting by as long as they don't fall ill, need dental work or get in a car wreck. The terribly sad part is that many see no light at the end of the tunnel. getAbstract finds that Ehrenreich is a gifted writer with keen perceptions and a wry sense of humor. Her narrative flows effortlessly as she enlightens, educates and entertains. If only she had a magic wand.

the book arrived in a timely manner and is in excellent condition as described. I will definitly buy again.

There are certainly many issues facing those who are trying to climb up from low paying and/or minimum wage jobs. However, this author's attitude that all those in this position are helpless victims doomed to lifelong poverty is ridiculous! As is the idea that anyone NOT mired in a tedious, low-paying job is somehow bad and to be blamed for those who are. She identifies with the poor almost pathologically without fair consideration to all involved, including the employers. And I found that very strange considering she is a well paid, successful writer living in a very high-rent area of this country (Key West, Florida) in her everyday life!

She herself enjoys all the benefits of the upper middle class lifestyle, and more power to her for earning them, yet, she rails relentlessly about others in this position and blames them for the plight of the working poor. When she works as a maid for a cleaning service, she comments about how insulted she is by one of the home-owners choice of books! Huh? She is angered that another home-owner has the audacity to own a set of copper pots and other home furnishings and decor that she finds disdainful as if these people are somehow at fault for being successful and having purchasing power, and heaven forbid, opinions and tastes that she does not share. She makes it clear that she herself does not regularly employee domestic help as that would just be, well, disdainful, yet, she admits to having done so on certain justifiable occasions. Really Barbara, you can't have it both ways!!

When an immigrant dishwasher at a restaurant where she works is caught red-handed stealing from the storehouse, she immediately identifies with the thief and becomes defensive of him. So stealing is OK if you're working for minimum wage? Would she have been so protective of the thief if he'd stolen say HER laptop or HER car or HER food? I wonder.

And did anyone notice that on two different occasions, regarding two of her jobs, the author brought up the widely held (and grossly misguided) concept that employers "hold back" the new employees first week of pay? As a human resources professional, I've battled this misconception amongst both white and blue collar employees for years and find it unfathomable that a person with a Ph.D. does not get it that the time she works this week is not actually paid for until the following pay period, usually the next week. There is no "holding back" of any pay, merely a lapse in time in which payroll processing takes place and a check printed. I found it incredible that this author did not grasp the logistics of this simple concept, and instead, clung to the ignorant idea that an employer would actually "hold back" pay until some such future date at their self-declared discretion, a practice that would be in fact, illegal.

Where is the balance in this so-called reporting? It's all and only about one side of the picture. And where are the suggestions? solutions? ideas for a better system? The concept of this book has great potential, but sadly, it falls flat and short of meeting it.

There are certainly many issues facing those who are trying to climb up from low paying and/or minimum wage jobs. Been there; done that. However, this author's attitude that all those in this position are helpless victims doomed to lifelong poverty is ridiculous! As is the idea that anyone NOT mired in a tedious, low-paying job is somehow bad and to be blamed for those who are. She identifies with the poor almost pathologically without fair consideration to all involved, including the employers. And I found that very strange considering she is a well paid, successful writer living in a very high-rent area of this country (Key West, Florida) in her everyday life!

She herself enjoys all the benefits of the upper middle class lifestyle, and more power to her for earning them, yet, she rails relentlessly about others in this position and blames them for the plight of the working poor. When she works as a maid for a cleaning service, she comments about how insulted she is by one of the home-owners choice of books! Huh? She is angered that another home-owner has the audacity to own a set of copper pots and other home furnishings and decor that she finds disdainful as if these people are somehow at fault for being successful and having purchasing power, and heaven forbid, opinions and tastes that she does not share. She makes it clear that she herself does not regularly employee domestic help as that would just be, well, disdainful, yet, she admits to having done so on certain justifiable occasions. Really Barbara, you can't have it both ways!!

When an immigrant dishwasher at a restaurant where she works is caught red-handed stealing from the storehouse, she immediately identifies with the thief and becomes defensive of him. So stealing is OK if you're working for minimum wage? Would she have been so protective of the thief if he'd stolen say HER laptop or HER car or HER food? I wonder.

And did anyone notice that on two different occasions, regarding two of her jobs, the author brought up the widely held (and grossly misguided) concept that employers "hold back" the new employees first week of pay? As a human resources professional, I've battled this misconception amongst both white and blue collar employees for years and find it unfathomable that a person with a Ph.D. does not get it that the time she works this week is not actually paid for until the following pay period, usually the next week. There is no "holding back" of any pay, merely a lapse in time in which payroll processing takes place and a check printed. I found it incredible that this author did not grasp the logistics of this simple concept, and instead, clung to the ignorant idea that an employer would actually "hold back" pay until some such future date at their self-declared discretion, a practice that would be in fact, illegal.

Where is the balance in this so-called reporting? It's all and only about one side of the picture. And where are the suggestions? solutions? ideas for a better system? The concept of this book has great potential, but sadly, it falls flat and short of meeting it.

The only reason I gave two stars to this book is because at least Ehrenreich tried to write about an important topic. But her execution falls well below the mark, and the book turns out to be more about a journalist pretending to be a low-income worker than about the lives of the low-income workers she's supposedly studying. It is, by turns, whiny, preachy, self-righteous, facile, and annoying -- much more often than it's insightful, which it is maybe a handful of times (if that) throughout the book. (The footnotes were actually among the most informative parts.) At times she even seems to be making fun of the workers with whom she briefly shared her life. And the "experiment" is flawed from the start, as the author herself more or less acknowledges, in that someone who knows that she can return to her real life any time is very different from someone who works for $7 an hour and has no choice. One also has to question the ethics of a decision to take a job that someone else really needs. Finally, as the book progresses, the author makes some bumbling attempts at humor that just aren't funny -- it feels like the writing of someone who thinks she's being clever but the jokes are flat or obvious, or someone who utters banalities as if they were profound insights. (Please, leave satire to the satirists.) One line in the book stood out for me as a reflection of everything that is wrong with it, and it was hard for me to keep reading after that. In the chapter on her experience in Maine, Ehrenreich asks the reader, "If you hump away at menial jobs 360-days-plus a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?" Well, DUH. As my partner pointed out, that sounds like the kind of idiotic "wisdom" that might show up on Carrie Bradshaw's computer in "Sex in the City."

So Ehrenreich gets some points for effort and for "humping away" at these jobs for as long as she did, I suppose, but as far as offering any real insights into or solutions for the lives of the working poor, this book leaves much to be desired. In the end, it's a book about Barbara Ehrenreich.

Well, what Ms. Ehrenreich doesn't know is that there is MUCH MUCH worse to come!! In just a few years when the greatest depression in US history (13 years long) is visited upon us, surviving on the minimum wage will seem like the good old days. Sadly, people will be glad to work under the conditions she's explored. Everything is relative. Don't think it's going to happen? Read Arnold's The Great Bust Ahead ([...]). The Great Bust Ahead: The Greatest Depression in American and UK History is Just Several Short Years Away. This is your Concise Reference Guide to Understanding Why and How Best to Survive It.

Another book explaining how we as a superpower are continuing to do a disservice to our own people. We can spend Billions on other countries to insure they have high-speed internet, but fight when it comes to guarnteeing medical for our children. It is not just that the system is not working... it is so far broken that it has been forgotten. How do we fix this? My grandma suggested an atmoic bomb, and although I thought this was ludicrious at first, I am begining to come around.

I think the premise was a good idea as a whole, but I don't believe Barbara Ehrenreich was the one to present it.
She tends to have a victim attitude in life, and a contempt for people who are successful, which I find ironic since I am sure she is not standing on a street corner giving away her profits from the book.

She opens fine and the footnotes are somewhat interesting but then she goes off on tangents that have nothing to do with the book. She claims to have this disdain for others who she feels are elitists but then she turns around and does the same thing herself. One example, which has no place in this story, in my opinion is when she, as an avid atheist, decided to attend a revival for fun, then not only proceeded to mock the people who went but called Jesus a socialist among other things I would rather not repeat. My opinion of her formed very quickly from that point.

She also points out that management in one of the companies she works for were simply jerks. Granted we all know the types but she didn't even try to see it from a balanced point of view. The Maid Company she worked for had some hard rules, like no water on the job, etc., which I found to be unreasonable, however she ended up blaming the homeowners, some that she never met. She had disdain for a Buddhists home who had spiritual messages throughout his house, once again she never met this person, yet felt free to judge.

Also as far as management is concerned, as a business owner I realize how some people are in this position but there are also two sides to a coin. She mentions how much she dislikes the people she works for with the "rules" yet in the next breath she talks about her and the "maids" in the company car driving through a nice area with the radio blarring and yelling "F*** YOU" out the car window to moms with stollers. When they cringed she mentions how she finds this behavior hysterically funny. Gee and you wonder why they have to set up rules. I wouldn't want her representing my company.

The book is not balanced. Last but not least, she claims so many of these people are in poverty, yet I can't help notice how many of them have no "lunch " money yet have plenty of funds for smoking and having kid after kid. Just an observation. It's too bad really the subject matter would have been good had it not been so tainted by attitude.

I have no doubt there are a great deal of working poor who are making ends meet and having a hard time. Those are the people she should have sought out. I believe she was too blinded by her anger or perhaps guilt over her own success to see it clearly.

If you'd like to hear the voices of the real working poor, get a copy of Without A Net: the female experience of growing up working class, edited by Michelle Tea. It is more poignant than a journalist's game of dress up.

I thought the concept of this book would be very interesting. However, the Author's delivery, not so much. I would have liked more details about her co-workers, friendships and follow ups on where are they now or simply more of a personal insite to the people. She was very "on the surface" with alot of descriptions. The Author was a bit arrogant by constantly reminding us about her eduation and background. I hope once she published this book that she gave something back to the hard working people that "helped" in her research. Or at least gave them a (free) copy of the book! The Author ends with some very strong and thought provoking points. All in all it's an ok book if you're not into details.

You ever have one of those crazy bosses?

She would blast ecological sounds so loudly we had to ask her to turn it down (our jobs included listening to actors read lines). Another time, she called in sick because she was "wafting vapors." She always brought up her education in conversation. She never seemed to actually do any work, but instead worked on her novel, using company resources to write it. And she was strangely preoccupied with "ganja" to the point that she used it as her password, a fact she was only too happy to share. "Wafting vapors" indeed.

After I finished reading Nickel and Dimed, I was convinced Ehrenreich was my former boss. A highly-educated journalist with an arch tone, she blesses us all with her insights by going undercover as a poor person and trying to get by. Which is a bit like the scene from Aladdin when the princess slips out into the real world.

You see, Ehrenreich wants to help people. She really does, and she views things in a sort of black and white, my way or the highway sort of charitable aggressiveness. She's an ideological bully, the kind that is impossible to argue with because she cloaks herself with the cause of the underdog.

And that's a shame, because Ehrenreich's absolutely right in what she uncovers: that the poor can't get by on minimum wage salaries in the year 2000. The only way to survive is to have a partner, she concludes, but with that comes the baggage of living with another person, possibly children, and all that entails. And yet, Ehrenreich's experiment lacks precisely that - when she is given the opportunity o move in with a friend, she turns it down.

Ehrenreich isn't a poor person. In fact, she is so NOT poor that she secretly feels she should be treated differently because she's better educated, or because she's a journalist, or because she's trying to help people when clearly bosses are greedy and poor people are too weak to fend for themselves.

In my first job, I worked in a factory. I've come a long way from that factory job, but it taught me a lot as a high school student. And what's missing most from Ehrenreich's tour in Poor People Land is that these people aren't characters in her book; they're real people. Ehrenreich never seems to detach herself from her upbringing, although she would have us believe otherwise. The signs, if you read carefully, are there.

The one that really turned me off was the fact that Ehrenreich, due to an "indiscretion," smokes pot when she knows she'll be going on job interviews. Now either Ehrenreich didn't know job interviews required drug testing, which speaks poorly to her journalistic abilities, or she has a fondness for pot she fails to disclose as part of who she is. From there it's railing against the system of drug testing, a charge that becomes shrill when she beats the test and sees that as further evidence that drug testing is dumb. There are lots of hard working poor folks who aren't smoking pot before job interviews, and Ehrenreich isn't doing the underrepresented poor any favors by succumbing to the stereotype.

The other hypocrisy is that Ehrenreich bristles at psychological tests. I agree with her, I hated those tests too. She objects to the tone of the questions and their underlying agenda, but the back of the book contains a "reader's guide" that asks such loaded questions as, "have you ever been homeless, unemployed, without health insurance, or held down two jobs? What is the lowest-paying job you ever held and what kind of help--if any--did you need to improve your situation?" The lack of self-awareness rife throughout the book is breathtaking.

The final indignity is when Ehrenreich, the educated white woman who knows better, decides on a lark to start a union at Wal-Mart. Heedless of what the consequences might be, she just skips right out of that final job into her conclusions. Never mind that Ehrenreich was intentionally rabble-rousing workers who, if they had decided to try to form a union, could have all lost their jobs. And where would that leave them, while Ehrenreich went back to her comfortable house?

But if you can look past that, and I'm sure a lot of people can't, the book's messages are sound. The end result of a capitalist system in America is ultimately hostile to itself. The rich need the poor to work as cheaply and inexpensively as possible, and this form of human labor market ultimately degrades the bottom ranks until they rebel. Ehrenreich doesn't have any answers as to why the poor haven't rebelled already and instead concludes with navel-gazing reader's guide.

Nickel and Dimed should be required reading for CEOs everywhere who are often responsible for the fates of thousands of peoples' livelihoods. I just wish Ehrenreich hadn't written it.

I mean really now. Who sees any sort of humor at all in this book?

I actually find the author's tone to be completely indignant and arrogant, she is ungracious, unkind, even cruel in her tone towards her "friends" and co-workers while she is playing poor.

She even goes so far as to compare her plight to that of a princess being punished by being forced to hand feed all her subjects... this lady is a real piece of work. She is absolutely deplorable and such a snobbish, egotistical (well a not so very nice person)! Her "insights" and her surprising realizations scare me, I mean if real people actually find shock and awe at the same everyday DUH she makes a big fuss over, then this country is way past salvageable!!!

She is a career essayist who lowers herself to play poor for a little while, and tries to maintain a decent quality of life while getting by on minimum wage, something which is definitely not her area of expertise. She describes looking for places to live, jobs, working conditions and overall environments of the places she goes.

She alienated, humiliated, and demeaned almost everyone she met, though not in any sort of dialog to their face, just her thoughts about them...

This is definitely a must read, but not for the reasons by which I kept being mislead. For people like myself, this is at times hard to read, however it is definitely a book you will not soon forget, and definitely an author you will not soon forget either.

"At the end of the day
You're another day older
That's all you can say of the life of the poor."

Welcome to Bush- and,shortly. post-Bush America, when more than 30% of Americans will be unable to find work that carries them beyond one's day's meals.

A must read.

I was curious about this book after hearing Ms. Ehrenreich interviewed on radio. She took a sabbatical from her reporting career and spent three months or more to see if she could live on minimum-wage employment.

First she describes how she lived in Key West trailer park, Florida, waitressing in a pancake house. She then moved to Maine, working in a nursing home as well as with a franchised cleaning service. For her third experience, she moved to Minneapolis to work at Wal-Mart.

The result was three failed attempts to live on hourly wages, but great insight on what many dismiss as the "working poor". That category leaves out a word; it should be "working poor people". Ehrenreich's book takes you into some of those lives. It is a must read, and a short book, so you might want to read it twice.

It is rare that a book would get me riled up as *Nickel and Dimed* did. I truly appreciated Ehrenreich's honesty about certain things before initiating her undercover investigation on whether people on minimum wage could survive on life (basic necessities).

Ehrenreich, well-educated, goes undercover by working various minimum wage jobs just to see if her meager salaries could carry her through life. She worked as a waitress, a maid and an "associate" at Wal-Mart, among other jobs.

Granted, her parameters or criteria did not accurately reflect those of the working class. First, she came into this research with some money, which she was able to afford uniforms, secure a temporary home and get some food. In addition, she had a laptop. Lastly, she went alone, without a family. I truly believe that her struggles/reports would be drastically different if she had no start-up money for these "luxuries".

However, the meat and potatoes of her research are the employers and their practices in employment, business and benefits/wages. I've once worked in the food & beverage industry and it's a tough place to work. However, the working conditions that she experienced as a waitress are appalling. Don't get me started with Molly Maid. I was literally this close to calling the company and giving them a piece of my mind. I certainly hoped that this book helped launched an investigation into the company. And Wal-Mart already had a bad reputation prior to my reading this book. After reading Ehrenreich's accounts, Wal-Mart is just the worst in terms of employment.

Anyways, the whole point of this research is to see if the working class are "too lazy" to "move on up to the East Side" (if you like The Jeffersons, you should have caught that phrase of the theme song). It turns out that it's not so simple. The working class are out there and pounding the road for a better life by getting a better job that can cover basic necessities, along with adequate benefits. They're also out there looking for suitable and affordable homes for their families. However, they faced obstacles by their employers' lack of provisions, shady practices (including drug testings) and hourly pays. In addition, they're not getting adequate services for housing or food assistance. They are literally forced to stay within that economic class.

I found Ehrenreich's book to be informative even if it riled me up. *Nickel and Dimed* helped raised an enhanced consciousness of those trying to live the American dream, just like everyone else.

I loved it. It was a page turner. It was a nice balance of serious ... very serious stuff about working lives of the full-time, barely-making-it workers ... mixed in with Ehrenreich's sense of humor. Oh, and it brought back memories of all those jobs (I've had a million of `em!) that paid terribly and humiliated you at least 8 times a day. Highly recommended.