Comparative Essay

a.

Nickel and Dimed focuses squarely on the workplace of the lower class: minimum-wage jobs that often involve providing service for others. All the other themes in the book spring from concerns about employment—work conditions, management styles of those in charge of low-wage workers, and the problem of minimum-wage work and whether it is possible to survive in modern America at that level of earning. This is often illustrated in the dollars-and-cents accountings Ehrenreich gives of how much she earns, how much she spends on necessities such as rent and food, and the minor extra expenses she cannot help, such as medicine and painkillers for work-related injuries (Ehrenreich, 170-190).

While on the other hand, the book “Made in America” tells about the great American Entrepreneur Sam Walton who was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma on 29 March 1918 and died in Little Rock, Arkansas on 5 April 1992. A child of the Depression, he grew up in Columbia, Missouri and worked his way through school to earn a degree in economics from the University of Missouri in 1940. He entered the US Army Reserves as a second lieutenant, then enrolled in a management training programme at the J.C. Penney department store in Des Moines, Iowa for $85 a month (Huey and Walton, 45 - 90).

b.

In Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich believes that some basic human needs are not met for lower-class workers, even if they have full-time jobs. The amount earned does not match the actual expenses incurred, most notably in housing. Minimum-wage work makes it difficult to gather the funds for a lease on an apartment, and compromises of various sorts are often made. Throughout Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich scrambles to find the right balance in her housing: affordable, close to work, and safe. Often, at least one of these criterion ends up being forfeited, as she depends on trailer parks and resident hotels to provide reasonable housing. Further, the extreme measures of screening and surveillance often imposed on workers make just keeping a job a stressful affair and encourage a more compliant workforce. Workers are, thus, not only unsure if their jobs can truly support them, they are also unsure if their jobs will always be there.

In Made in America, Walton discusses different business issues of America. At that time, American manufacturers disliked discount retailing because it threatened their control of the market-place, and traditional retailers hated the practice because it meant having to sell more goods for the same return. However, Walton could see where retailing was going. The big American chains located their discount stores in or near large cities, but Walton set out to prove that discounting could also work in small towns. Once committed to the concept, he resolved not just to imitate the other franchised chains but to become a leader in the discount retail field. Volume buying directly from manufacturers and a cheap and efficient delivery system enabled Wal-Mart to sell high-quality, low-cost merchandise in locations where there was little competition from other retail ...