NICKLE AND DIMED

Nickle and Dimed



Nickle and Dimed

Introduction

In her introduction, Ehrenreich shows that she has a clear sense of what her experiment can and cannot establish convincingly. She is aware of the ways in which she is not typical, aware of the advantages she brings to her new life: education, good health and good health habits, white skin, English fluency, and the knowledge that she can return to her own life at any time. She allows herself a car and an ATM card for actual emergencies. She does not have young children who need supervision while she is away at work. Her experience, therefore, is not typical, but probably the best that can be hoped for “in the economy's lower depths.”

Discussion

For her first stop, Ehrenreich moves to Key West, Florida, a small city near her own home. Although she has tried to prepare for what she is about to do, she exactly stymied. She has guessed that she can earn about seven dollars an hour and that she should; therefore, be able to spend five or six hundred dollars on rent. The cheapest place she can find in Key West, however, is a trailer with no air-conditioning, screens, or fans for $675 a month. Ultimately she decides to take a one-room cabin thirty miles out of town, and drive the forty-five minutes back and forth each day (Kerr, 2001).

With a home secured for her first month, Ehrenreich finds a job as a waitress in a family-style restaurant she calls the “Hearthside,” attached to a chain motel. She will work an eight-hour shift and earn $2.43 an hour plus tips. She approaches the job with merry cheer, and a dark humor that labeled “sassy” and “irreverent” in reviews. For the most part, she turns the humor against herself, as she struggles with her own incompetence in the face of demanding and intricate work, but she saves some jabs for arrogant managers and inconsiderate customers. Soon she adds a second job, serving food at another restaurant, Jerry's, but can manage two shifts and the long drive back home for only two days. By month's end, she has quit the Hearthside, moved to a trailer closer to one job to save driven time and gas money, and taken a second job as a housekeeper in the hotel attached to Jerry's.

Her next stop is Portland, Maine. Arriving on a Trail ways bus with one ...