Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

It's easy to dismiss Barbara Ehrenreich as being merely a tourist. Sort of a ghetto Elizabeth Gilbert who enjoys the type of lifestyle where she can just “drop out” for a couple months for the sake of the written word. She comes from the decidedly white collar world where “sweat is a metaphor for hard work, but seldom its consequence.” Nonetheless I've held variations of the jobs she explores, in my late teens and early 20s but always came home to the comforts of my middle class upbringing. She's 50 and slogging through the work week to sleep in some barely hospitable living conditions. Let's cut her some slack.

“Take away the career and the higher education, and maybe what you're left with is this original Barb, the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real if her father hadn't managed to climb out of the mines. So it's interesting, and more than a little disturbing, to see how Barb turned out – that she's meaner and slyer than I am, more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I'd hoped.”