Book Review: Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

My Goodreads review of Nickel and Dimed is exactly one sentence long: this book should be required reading for every American. I wrote that in April 2020, mid–Barbara Ehrenreich bender (three of her books in three weeks, back to back, while the world was locked down and “essential worker” had just entered everyone’s vocabulary). Six years later, I’m not softening a word of it.

The premise, spoiler-free (yes, I keep nonfiction spoiler-free too): in the late ’90s, Ehrenreich — a journalist with a PhD — went undercover in the low-wage economy to answer one question. Can you actually survive in America on what these jobs pay? She waited tables in Florida, scrubbed houses for a maid service in Maine, and worked the sales floor of a Walmart in Minnesota, hunting for rent she could afford on each paycheck. The book is her dispatch from the other side of the economy.

What I Loved About Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich is the rare journalist who can make you laugh on one page and make you furious on the next, and she never treats her coworkers as case studies. They’re people: people training her, covering for her, working two jobs and running on vending-machine crackers. The reporting makes the invisible math of low-wage life impossible to unsee. One job is never enough. Housing eats everything. And “unskilled labor” is a myth that doesn’t survive a single shift of waitressing.

I’ve spent years writing about what writing pays. This book is about what everything else pays, and it permanently changed how I think about work in this country. It’s also just compulsively readable — investigative journalism with the pace of a diary.

What I Didn’t Love About Nickel and Dimed

That it was published in 2001 and you could reissue it tomorrow with new prices and change almost nothing else. (That’s not a flaw in the book. That’s a flaw in the country.)

Final Thoughts on Nickel and Dimed

Full disclosure: I actually read Bait and Switch first, out of order, so take my corrected itinerary — start here, then read that one for the white-collar sequel, then finish with Had I Known for the collected essays. Required reading for every American. I meant it in 2020 and I mean it now.

My final score: 5 out of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Do I recommend this book? 👍 Yes!

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