Nickel and Dimed, pt. 2

In this section of the book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara travels to Maine. She is amazed that almost everyone she see is caucasian. She describes how everyone is caucasian, the students, the housekeepers, the panhandlers. And everyone spoke english. This is very funny to me because now that I look at Edina, I notice that almost all the people I see are caucasian. I had never really thought about that before. Thats the mark of a good book when it causes you to see things differently.

She finds that the low paying workplace is still not a good place to work, even when you move to significantly different surroundings. She at first thinks "Maybe if you give white people a whole state to themselves, they treat aone another real nice."(52) She still pays just as much, if not more. The managers are still abusive. And you can't survive without 2 or 3 jobs. You turn out to be working 3/4 of the day and can't support yourself.

Nickel and Dimed 1

On monday morning, I was just about to walk out the door to my bus when I thought, "Hey, I need a book for English class today!"That was when I ran downstairs and found an excellent book that I hadn't read for several years. It named Nickel and Dimed and its author is Barbara Ehrenreich. I compare Nickel and Dimed to Don't Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock's (remember Super Size Me?) in the way that the author goes out and does something that no sane person would do, enter the "unskilled" market (In Spurlock's case, eating a diet of McDonalds for a month). Ehrenreich leaves her home, and enters the world of low wage work.

Ehrenrich goes through three states, Minnesota, Maine, and Florida, in order to find if low paying work is a possible lifestyle. Her list of jobs ranges from waitressing at restaurants, and working at Wal- Mart, to working at Merry Maids. Her book was written in order to defeat common thoughts like, if someone works, they aren't poor or that low wage workers are too lazy to rise through the ranks. To back up the first example, there is a passage in Nickel and Dimed that works very well, "Joan, lives in a van parked behind a shopping center at night and showers in Tina's motel room." (Nickel and Dimed, 26.) She also works a full time job. This shows that even though she works many many hours, she still has to do all that.javascript:void(0)