Nickel and Dimed

About Nickel and Dimed

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001) is the account of her experiment working minimum-wage jobs — waitress, hotel maid, Merry Maid cleaning woman, Walmart associate — in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota, attempting to survive on what she earned. A defining work of immersive economic journalism, it demonstrates through lived experience that minimum-wage labor cannot support minimum-wage housing in most American cities, and that this gap is structural rather than the result of individual failure.