Nickel and Dimed Book ReportEssay title: Nickel and Dimed Book ReportNICKEL AND DIMED BOOK REPORTBarbara Ehrenreich is a journalist who wrote the book Nickel and Dimed. She goes undercover to see how it feels to work for $6 to $7 an hour. She leaves her regular life to explore the experiences of a minimum wage worker. Ehrenreich travels to Florida, Maine, and Minnesota, looking for jobs and places to live on a minimum wage salary. At one point in time, she had to work two jobs to makes ends meet. As she worked all these jobs, she discovered many problems in the social world. The things she went through were not the types of situations that she usually experienced. She wasn’t used to living and working environments of the poor. She had to deal with the different personalities and customs of her co-workers, their living arrangement, and the management hierarchy in each job. She worked as a waitress at two different restaurants, as a maid service cleaning houses, and as a dietary aide at a nursing home.
Ehrenreich didn’t want to be a waitress any more than some waitresses, but she did it for her research. Ehrenreich once stated that, “Waitres sing is also something I’d like to avoid, because I remember it leaving me bone-tired when I was eighteen.” (13). Her first job was at Hearthside, a restaurant in Key West, Florida. She was hired as a waitress, starting at $2.43 plus tips. She worked the afternoon shift. Hearthside was being managed by a West Indian man by name of Phillip. The management wasn’t the best. They treated their employees disrespectfully. At an employee meeting, they were threatened by the management. Ehrenreich stated, “I have not been treated this way-lined up in the corridor, threatened with locker searches, peppered with carelessly aimed accusation-since junior high school” (24). When they were just standing around, the manager would give them extra work to do. According to Ehrenreich, “You start dragging out each little chore because if the manager on duty catches you in an idle moment, he will give you something far nastier to do. So I wipe, I clean, consolidate catsups bottles and recheck the cheesecake supply, even tour the tables to make sure the customer evaluation is standing perkily.” (22). They were hired at Hearthside to serve the customers. There are twenty-six tables in the whole restaurant. All the food must be placed on the food trays; small items were to be carried in a bowl, and no refills on the lemonade (17). Everyone got along with each other. They would cover each other’s back if someone wanted to take a smoke or “pee” break. When they would have an employee meeting, each person was for himself. Ehrenreich explained how “Joan complains about the condition of the ladies’ room and I throw in my two bits about the vacuum cleaner. But I didn’t see any backup coming from my fellow servers, each of whom has slipped into her own personal funk; Gail, my role model, stares sorrowfully at a point six inches from her nose.” (24).
Ehrenreich learned the entire staff of Hearthside had difficulty with their living arrangements. After a week, Ehrenreich compiled the following survey: Gail is sharing a room in a well-known downtown flophouse for $250 a week. Her roommate, a male friend, has begun hitting her, driving her nuts, but the rent would be impossible alone. Claude, the Haitian cook, is desperate to get out the two-bedroom apartment he shares with his girlfriend and two other unrelated people. “ As far as I can determine, the other Haitian men live similarly crowded situations. Annette, a twenty-year old server who is six months pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend, lives with her mother, a postal clerk. Marianne, who is a breakfast server, and her boyfriend are paying $170 a week for a one-person trailer. Billy, who at $10 an hour is the wealthiest of us, lives in the trailer he owns, paying only the $400-a month lot fee” (26). No one made enough money to stay in a decent place to live. While still working at Hearthside, she searched for another job so that she would have enough money to maintain a minimal standard of living.
Ehrenreich’s second job was working at another restaurant named Jerry’s. She stated, “The management at Jerry’s is generally calmer and more professional.” (36). One particular time the manager, B.J., approached her in the face. Ehrenreich explained ”Instead of saying you are fired, she says you are doing fine. The only trouble is I’m spending time chatting with customers.” (36). Jerry’s had more customers the Hearthside, so there was more work to do. She was there to serve the Customers and move orders from the kitchen to the tables. The co-workers were very supportive of each other. According to Ehrenreich, “All in all we form a reliable mutual-support group”. She discovers “Of her fellow servers everyone lacks a husband or boyfriend to work a second job” (39). At Jerry’s everyone had
a good word about the way Jerry’s is done, including the way he likes you. Ahnecht was never interested in business. She is the only woman who still works at Jerry’s in Canada (40) during the recession.
How does you come to the conclusion that Jerry’s is a nice little place to live?
It’s a nice little place to work. Yes you do there for a good reason. When I started working there, I wasn’t feeling the pressures that I’d been feeling for so long; I’d worked long hours at a factory, so it felt like a good way to find work that paid my rent. At the beginning of 2013, I started thinking about working for Jerry’s, and was a bit taken aback by how many people were working in that small cafe. However, I soon saw that, from the outside looking in, at Jerry’s, the other people were making a lot more sense, if you count the people we hired at a store to be paid less. They wanted an office, and were looking for the best job available to them. There just wasn’t enough demand in Canada.
Are there other places in the country that can serve customers that were not so good as McDonald’s and other McDonald’s like McDonald’s International, Inc.?
At McDonald’s, we had more stores in a lot of places, and it wasn’t quite in the same area as McDonald’s Canada where we have other supermarkets in Ottawa, and in Calgary and so on. Even though we still have a good number of customers, there is a lack of staff and people.
How about at McDonald’s in Ottawa or wherever you can go? I don’t know if anyone actually goes to McDonald’s. In any event, it seems like it’s a big place to work.
One last question: Is there any other restaurants that can really serve Canadian customers?
I wish we could have more Canadian service restaurants. We already have a very good line of french fries that are in excellent condition. There are some restaurants in Calgary that are serving Canadian guests just like McDonald’s. We have the same style of fast food in every direction of your life, and even at McDonald’s there are a large number of international and international servers.
Let’s talk about the French fries. There are so many french fries in Montreal that are made in China that are one of the best. I mean it’s not a problem, if one can get through to us at a reasonable cost and bring our kids to McDonald’s, one can enjoy the quality here, and get a taste of french fries. There’s nothing wrong with that. We also serve many different types of beef. It isn’t just french fries, but hamburgers, hamburgers, french fries, french fries. The main thing is, we serve them in very good quality because they are delicious