Ehrenreich enjoys serving the elderly people in the Alzheimer’s ward because it reminds her of her father who died from Alzheimer’s, but she finds that cleaning up after them is difficult and wonders about the safety of allowing people without any credentials to care for medically vulnerable people in nursing homes. After a few days, she secures two jobs: during the weekends she works as a dietary aide at a nursing home for $7 an hour, and Monday to Friday she works as a house cleaner with The Maids, a corporate cleaning service that sends teams of cleaners to different homes every day. It is hard for her to find a place that is acceptable, and she settles on a cottage with a kitchen that is embarrassingly close to the restroom. Next, she moves to Portland, Maine in late summer when the tourists are already leaving she believes she has a chance of securing affordable housing. She feels a deep sense of failure for giving up. She tries to get a second job as a hotel housekeeper to make ends meet, but she does not have the energy: she quits both jobs after one day of attempting to do double shifts.

She ends up quitting the job at Hearthside and taking a job as a waitress at Jerry’s. However, she finds that the managers are mean-spirited and hypercritical, and that the pay is far too low, so she seeks out a job at Jerry’s, a more popular restaurant where she hopes that her tips will increase. She meets Gail, a light-footed 50-year-old waitress who trains her, and other coworkers such as Lionel and Joan who she likes and gets along with. She finds a cheap efficiency and takes a job as a waitress at a restaurant named Hearthside. She also decides to give herself a few luxuries: she will always have a car and will end the experiment if she is at risk of becoming houseless.Įhrenreich starts in her home city of Key West, Florida. The rules of the experiment are that she cannot rely on any skills she acquired from her education to get jobs she has to take the highest-paying job offered to her and she has to live in the cheapest accommodations available that are safe and private.

The primary question Ehrenreich is attempting to answer in Nickel and Dimed is whether she can survive on the wages of the lowest-paying jobs in America.

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich