Introduction to Nickel and Dimed

            Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich is the story about one woman’s experience of living on minimum wage. She is a college-educated writer who goes undercover as a low-income worker. She works one month at a time in three different locations working different jobs. Some of her jobs are waitress, housekeeper, dietary aid, and maid. She sets rules and limitations to keep her experiment as close to reality as possible. During this experiment Ehrenreich sets guidelines for herself.  One guideline is that she will not allow herself to starve or be without a home. We all thought this book would be interesting to read because we wanted to see how hard it would be to live on our own, with our current income.

Our Nickel and Dimed group is made up of four members.  All of the members of this group are Caucasian, freshmen college students from Wisconsin. Alex Webster is from Green Bay; he has worked for near minimum wage for 3 and half years at a grocery store. Kassi Bierman is from Janesville and has worked various jobs at a restaurant making near minimum wage.  Brittney Nehring is from Augusta, and has worked as a cashier at a grocery store for minimum wage. Kallie Thoreson is from Grantsburg and has earned near minimum wage as a teller in a credit union. We all have either worked for minimum wage or near minimum wage jobs so we can relate to the authors experience of continually working for minimum wage. Based on our previous experiences working at low wages, we understand that it would be difficult to actually live on that little of income. We never had to actually live on the wages we earned. We will be keeping a blog on our thoughts as we read through this great book.