Nickel and Dimed: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

From the sky Minnesota looks lush and picturesque. Barbara isn’t sure why she chose Minneapolis as her next destination: she knows Minnesota is a pretty liberal state and generous to its welfare poor, and an Internet search has shown that there are jobs for $8 an hour and studio apartments for $400 or less. This time, she’s looking for a more comfortable situation.

Barbara gets a $10 map of the Twin Cities at the airport and picks up her new Rent-A-Wreck. She’s staying at the apartment of friends of friends while they’re back east for a few days, in return for taking care of their cockatiel (despite her phobia of birds). It’s a tiny one-bedroom with furnishings from the late seventies. It’s pleasant and cozy, and Barbara has learned that part of low-wage working life is sharing small spaces with others—in this case, a cockatiel.

The next morning, Barbara starts her job search, this time looking for a change to retail or factory work. She fills out applications at the closest Wal-Marts and the Targets across town, when it strikes her that with her lack of experience, she’ll have a better chance showing up in person. She calls one of the Wal-Marts and speaks to Roberta, who tells her to come into her store office. Roberta had six children before starting at Wal-Mart, so she’s sympathetic to Barbara “re-entering the workforce.” But after she takes Barbara’s personality survey to the computer to score, she comes back with the news that three answers are in need of further discussion. Barbara had left wriggle room in some survey questions so it didn’t look like she was faking out the test. It seems this was the wrong approach—it pays to be a full-blown suck-up.

After going through the questionable answers, Roberta introduces Barbara to Sam Walton’s personal philosophy—service, excellence, and something else Roberta can’t remember. Barbara expresses wholehearted agreement. All that’s left is to pass the drug test. Unfortunately, Barbara has had a slight “indiscretion” in the past few weeks involving marijuana, which she knows can linger in the body.

So Barbara goes back to the help-wanted ads, and heads to an interview for an assembly job across town. She gets overwhelmed in the afternoon urban traffic and doesn’t reach the factory before 5. Lost, she pulls into a parking lot and sees a Menards housewares store (like a Home Depot) with a “Now Hiring” sign. Paul in the personnel office hands her the personality test: it seems rougher, asking questions about fistfights and whether dealing cocaine could ever not be a crime. Paul says she’d be good in plumbing at $8.50, as long as she passes a drug test.

After a full day of job searching, Barbara is feeling worn down from having to lie throughout the personality tests—she wouldn’t snitch on an employee and doesn’t believe management rules by divine right. It also frustrates her that her ability to perform a job well and her engaging qualities can be trumped by smoking pot. That weekend she goes on a drug detox, informed by internet searches and assisted by $30 ingredients bought at GNC.

On Saturday Barbara also goes through all the apartment agencies, and comes up only with 12-month leases and plenty of places where they don’t answer the phone. The cockatiel, constantly squawking and pacing, prevents any kind of relaxation. On Sunday she goes to the home of an aunt of a friend from New York. Though Barbara has been concerned that it’s artificial to move to a totally new place without housing (making the project of her book inauthentic), friends and family, or a job, it turns out that this woman did exactly that in the seventies, moving from New York to Florida.

Caroline lives with her family in a three-bedroom for $825 a month, which doesn’t seem bad to Barbara, though the block is full of drug dealers and the dining room ceiling leaks. But Caroline gets $9 an hour at a downtown hotel, and her husband makes $10 as a maintenance worker. Together, at $40,000 a year, they’re official “middle class.”

Caroline is a real-life version of Barbara’s experiment: she’d been working in New Jersey when she left a difficult home situation and decided to leave for Florida, where she’d heard the rents were lower. She had clothes, Greyhound tickets, and $1,600 in cash. The bus dropped her and her kids off outside Orlando, where they stayed at a low-priced hotel and found a church. People from church drove her to the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children, a federal food program) and to find a school and day-care. Soon she found a job cleaning hotel rooms for about $300 a week, which gave her backaches and meant her 12-year-old had to watch the baby all evening.

Caroline was in constant stress and anxiety, in addition to pain from work. But she made a few friends, including Irene, a migrant farmworker whose boyfriend murdered a man who had raped her and was permanently in prison. Caroline took Irene in and she got a job, but after awhile Irene started drinking and carousing and finally left to live with a man. Caroline hasn’t been able to find Irene since. Caroline also met her current husband in Florida, though the two suffered bouts of homelessness before ending up here.

When Barbara leaves to go, Caroline comes back with a family-sized container of homemade stew. Caroline truly did it all on her own, with children, Barbara realizes, while she herself is only a pretender.

On Monday, drug test day, Barbara goes to a chiropractor’s office for the Wal-Mart test. She is sent into a regular public rest room with plastic containers to fill (she could easily have substituted someone else’s pee with a vial). For Menards, she is sent to a suburban hospital, where, after forty minutes, a nurse arrives and tells her to go into a bathroom to wash her hands and pee while the nurse waits with her purse. She realizes how much drug testing limits workers’ mobility, since each potential new job requires the application, interview, and drug test, requiring hours spent driving around and money spent on babysitters.

Barbara continues applying for jobs, since she doesn’t yet know the drug tests results. She applies for one entry-level customer service job, involving a group interview conducted by Todd in a large room at “Mountain Air,” an “environmental consulting firm” offering help to people with asthma and allergies. They will be sent out to these people in their own cars and make $1,650 if they complete 54 2-hour appointments in a month. Mountain Air is really looking for a self-disciplined, money-motivated, and positive attitude—nothing about healing the sick, Barbara realizes. Todd stresses that the job is a question of taking people who have a serious problem, though far less serious than they think it is, and leaving them happy with a “Filter Queen” appliance. Barbara completes a personal 3-minute interview, and says she wants the job to help people with asthma. Nothing about the bottom line—which perhaps is why, 2 hours later, she’s told there’s no job for her.

The apartment search, meanwhile, is increasingly desperate: the vacancy rate is apparently less than 1 percent, and even lower for “affordable” housing. Barbara is only now realizing how vast Minneapolis is, and that her two job possibilities are about 30 miles apart. There is one place, the Hopkins Park Plaza, which rents “affordable” apartments weekly or monthly. After days of trying to get in touch, she reaches Hildy, who says she might as well come apply (for $20), even if nothing’s available. Turnover is always high, Hildy says, so Barbara decides to turn down a $144-per-week basement apartment without a kitchenette—which turns out to be a mistake.

The rental agents that Barbara does reach recommend finding a weekly motel until something opens up. But the lowest is the Hill View at $200 per week, and it’s far outside the city, with no commercial establishments around. Another, Twin Lakes, is inside the city, but is $295. Everything looks gray and stained, but it’s her best bet, and she takes it.

On the job front, though, Barbara is told to show up for orientation at Menards on Wednesday morning. A blonde in her forties explains the rules, and says that the tools they’re required to wear on their belts will be deducted from their paycheck. They’re handed vests and IDs. Barbara has to ask if this means she’s hired, since there’s been no offer made, but it seems she is.

Barbara meets her supervisor in plumbing, Steve, who’s nice, though she realizes the shelves contain no items she can name. But she learns she’ll be starting Friday and will be making an incredible $10 an hour.

Though Barbara doesn’t need the Wal-Mart job now, Roberta calls her telling her to come the next day for orientation. When Roberta says the wage is $7 an hour (only after Barbara asks specifically), she decides she certainly won’t take the job, but will attend orientation for the sake of inquiry.

The Wal-Mart orientation, which Barbara believes is unrivaled in grandeur and intimidation, is supposed to take 8 hours. They begin with a video on the history and philosophy of Wal-Mart, including an almost cult-like legend about Sam Walton and Wal-Mart’s transformation from a five-and-dime into the nation’s largest private employer.

Sam is shown saying that the best ideas come from the employees or “associates,” like having a “people greeter” welcoming each customer upon entering the store. The associates are encouraged to think of managers as “servant leaders,” serving both them and the customers. But the music turns ominous as the video warns of problems with “associate honesty,” like thefts by cashiers.

Another video talks about the feeling of family for which Wal-Mart is so well known, meaning that there is no place for a union—in fact, it says, unions have been targeting Wal-Mart for years to greedily collect dues money. Employees could lose their voice to the union organizers and even their wages and benefits would be put at risk, the video warns.

Next are the rules against jewelry and blue jeans, and especially against “time theft”—doing anything other than working during company time (even as the employees’ time doesn’t seem to count, since during orientation they are often left for many minutes at a time in the small training room).

Barbara drinks a caffeinated coffee—rare for her—and finds herself wired for the next steps: creating name cards for themselves, participating in Computer-Based Learning on topics like what to do if pools of human blood should appear on the sales floor.

That night is a sleepless one. Budgie the cockatiel has gone haywire and refuses to return to his cage. Small things have been going wrong: Barbara had to spend $11 to replace her watch battery, three wash cycles ($3.75) to get out an ink stain on her khakis, and pay $20 for the belt she needed for Menards. She’s still jittery from the caffeine, even though she’s due at Menards at 12.

Barbara now realizes that she’s employed at both places, but the endless orientation at Wal-Marts has done some work on her, and she can’t imagine mastering plumbing projects when she’s so sleep-deprived. She calls Paul, who says she’d be working from noon to eleven, and that $10 an hour can’t be right—he’ll have to check. Now Barbara is unnerved. She tells Paul she can’t start. It’s all, she admits to herself, because of the coffee mistake, since she’s now too exhausted to work for 11 hours in a row.

Barbara wonders why she hadn’t bargained with Roberta about the wages. She realizes that employers are clever with their hiring process: one moves from application to orientation without ever meeting the potential employer as a free agent able to bargain. Even in a tight labor market like Minneapolis, the potential employee is made to feel like a supplicant.

On Saturday, Barbara packs up and heads to the Twin Lakes, where she finds that the room she’d requested is now taken. She calls the Clearview Inn, another rental place, which is $245 per week and closer to the Wal-Mart. That price is still higher than her aftertax weekly pay, but she’s confident she’ll get a room from Hildy next week, and the weekend job at a supermarket that she applied to.

The Clearview Inn may well be the worst motel in the country—not an easy feat. There’s a stench of mold when the wife of the young East Indian owner shows Barbara in. She switches to another room with a bed, chair, drawers, and a TV fastened to the wall, with a single overhead bulb. There’s no AC or fan and no bolt on the door. She can see through the other motel windows to rooms with a woman with a baby, two bunches of teenagers, and various single men.

Without a bolt, shades, or screens, Barbara feels vulnerable and is afraid to sleep. She dozes on and off, realizing at one point in the night that poor women really do have more to fear than women who live in houses with double locks, dogs, and husbands.

That Monday, Barbara arrives to Wal-Mart and is directed to ladies’ wear. Ellie, a manager, sets her to “zone” the summer dresses, or group them by color, design, and size. She helps Melissa, also new on the job, to consolidate certain Kathie Lee dresses so that the other silky ones can be prominently displayed in the “image” area.

Their job turns out to be keeping the ladies’ wear area “shoppable.” Instead of asking if customers need help, they’re meant to put away the “returns” and the items scattered and dropped by customers. For the first few days, Barbara struggles to memorize the one thousand-square-foot layout, from the “woman” sizes through the Kathie Lee and teen-oriented Jordache collections. There are dozens of each kind of item, and the layout suddenly changes every few days.

Barbara feels resentful and somewhat contemptuous the first few days: nothing’s very urgent, and no one will go hungry or be hurt if she makes a mistake. Wal-Mart mandates that all employees in this section be called “ladies,” and bars them from raising their voices or swearing, which she also finds grating.

At Wal-Mart, customers shop with shopping carts filled to the brim, often leaving about 90 percent rejected. Barbara and Melissa measure their workload in “carts.” It takes her 45 minutes to return the rejected contents from a cart her first week, which she eventually gets down to 30. There’s minimal human interaction, though sometimes Melissa and Barbara try to make up a task they can do together.

Barbara likes Ellie, who’s polite and demure, though she doesn’t like the assistant manager, Howard, who spends ten minutes taking attendance at the first meeting. He admonishes associates for loitering and talking to each other and for committing “time theft.”

When Barbara arrives at the Clearview, the sewage has been backed up in her room and is all over the floor. She’s moved into another room, which has a screen in tatters and, again, no fan. She only has a few possessions with her, the most expensive of which is her laptop, but with temperatures in the nineties she hesitates to leave it in the car trunk during the day.

That afternoon at Wal-Mart, Alyssa, another new orientee, had asked whether a clearanced $7 polo shirt might fall further. Barbara hadn’t recalled that polos, not t-shirts, are required for employees, but at $7 an hour a $7 polo shirt is beyond her budget.

That evening, Barbara scopes out the low-priced food options in Clearview—only a Chinese buffet or Kentucky Fried Chicken. She chooses the latter and eats in front of the TV, though it’s tricky without a table, and wonders why the contestants on Survivor would ever volunteer for an artificially daunting task—before remembering her own situation.

Barbara notices that there’s only one bed for the two African American men who live next door—she can see everything, and notices that they take turns sleeping in the bed and in the van outside. It seems that Clearview is full of working people who just don’t have the capital for a regular apartment. She wakes up at night to hear a woman singing sadly against the sound of trucks on the highway.

The next morning, Barbara buys hard-boiled eggs at a convenience store and takes out the trash. The owner’s wife does clean the rooms, but she rarely remembers more than the bare basics. Barbara pictures the wife as a product of an arranged marriage and a move from her native village to Clearview, Minnesota, with a husband who may not even speak her language.

The next morning, Barbara tries to spruce herself up: she doesn’t want to look homeless, though she essentially is. She’s been stressed and getting stomachaches, so she hasn’t been eating lunch – not ideal in a job where she’s always on her feet.

That day, though, Barbara arrives with bounce in her step to Wal-Mart, trying to think positively. She’d told Melissa she was living on fast food at a hotel, so Melissa has brought her a sandwich for lunch. Barbara is overwhelmed by this generosity, which counteracts the severe, penny-pinching corporate philosophy.

In Barbara’s second week, her shift changes from 10-6 to 2-11, so an extra half hour and a dinner break. Her two 15-minute breaks are now vital, and she tries to juggle simultaneous needs of drinking, getting outside, and sitting down, especially when heading to the Radio Grill for an iced tea could waste four precious minutes. The post-Memorial Day weekend lull has ended, so there are always at least a dozen shoppers in ladies’, and whole families in the evening.

For the first half of the shift, Barbara manages to be helpful and cheery. But at 6 or 7, she starts to detest the shoppers—the toddlers who pull down everything in reach, the obese Caucasians—and consider them merely an interruption from how things should be, with every piece of clothing unsold and in its place.

One evening, Barbara is exhausted when she returns from her last break to find a new employee folding T-shirts in one of “her” areas. The woman says Barbara has been putting certain T-shirts away in the wrong place. She chides Barbara not to forget to check the ten-digit UPC numbers. Barbara snaps back at her, saying their time is better spent putting things away from the carts. The woman says she only folds—she’s too petite to reach the upper racks, which gives Barbara malicious glee. She worries that she’s growing into a meaner, bitchier person. “Barb,” which is on her ID tag and what she was called as a child, isn’t Barbara. She wonders if this is who she would have become without her father’s luck and hard work.

The day Barbara moves to the Hopkins Park Plaza, there’s a new woman there, who says Barbara misunderstood and the room won’t be available until next week. Barbara is dismayed. But she knows that at $179 a week, even Hopkins Park would be too expensive without a second job. She’s applied for a weekend job at the Rainbow supermarket for $8 an hour. With both jobs, she’d make about $320 a week after taxes, so that rent will be 55 percent of her income, or closer to “affordable.” But then, Rainbow decides they need her five days a week, not just weekends, and Howard schedules a different day off for her every week.

In the long run, Barbara knows things will work out if she devotes her mornings to job hunting while waiting for a Hopkins Park opening or an apartment at $400 a month. But by then she’ll really be broke. The YWCA refers her to Budget Lodging, which only has dorm beds for $19 a night. She’s relieved to rule that out since it’s on the other side of Minneapolis.

Barbara calls Caroline for any insights, and Caroline invites Barbara to move in with her family. Though Barbara refuses, she’s rejuvenated by the sense that she’s not entirely alone. The Clearview now wants $55 a night for further nights, but the Comfort Inn has a room available for $49.95 a night. She reserves but feels defeated, though less so when she sees a front-page newspaper headline saying “Apartment rents skyrocket,” while vacancy rates remain low. Prosperity, ironically, is increasing upward pressure on rents and further hurting low-wage workers.

When Barbara moves into the Comfort Inn, she thinks it’ll only be for a night or two, but this turns out to be her moment of final defeat. In three weeks she’s spent over $500 and discovers that she has earned only $42 from Wal-Mart for orientation. They’ve withheld her first week’s pay, and when they do pay her it will come too late.

Though Barbara never finds an apartment, her last attempt is to call the United Way of Minneapolis, through which she finally reaches the Community Emergency Assistance Program. A woman there suggests she moves into a homeless shelter to save up for a rent and deposit, and sends her to another office to apply for a housing subsidy. But there, she finds only an out-of-date list of affordable apartments.

Back at the first office, the woman says she’ll find some kind of emergency food aid: a bar of soap, lots of candy and cookies, and a one-pound can of ham. The woman mixes Barbara up several times with someone else who worked at Wal-Mart who came in a few days ago. Barbara had already realized that many of her coworkers are poor, but now knows that some of them are residents of shelters.

Now, at the Comfort Inn, Barbara lives surreally in a business traveler’s room before going out to her shabby “real” life. But she sleeps better, and improves from day to day at Wal-Mart. On one Saturday, a heavier shopping day, she arrives to clothes tossed inches deep on the floor, but reaches a kind of flow state in which all her tasks seem to complete themselves. She realizes, while picking things up, that what she does here is what most mothers do at home, picking up the toys and spills—so here the mothers get to behave like small children. She suggests her theory to her coworker Isabelle: that rates of child abuse would soar without them around to give mothers this break, and they should be getting paid like therapists as a result, and Isabelle just laughs.

Barbara has to wonder why anyone puts up with the wages they’re paid. Most of her fellow workers have other jobs or partners, but still, there’s no signs of complaining or resentment. Maybe it’s what happens when drug tests and personality “surveys” create a uniformly servile workplace, she thinks. But Wal-Mart is also a world within itself, a super-sized corporate entity directed from afar and against any form of local initiative.

Barbara asks Isabelle how she can afford to live on $7 an hour, and she says she lives with her grown daughter, who also works. She also now gets paid $7.75 an hour after two years, and tells Barbara to be patient. Melissa says she made twice as much when she was a waitress, but that place closed down. Barbara understands Melissa’s unwillingness to start up again searching for another job, with the applications, interviews, and drug tests.

A few days later, Melissa is assigned to bras, a new section for her. She confides to Barbara that she doesn’t like taking too long with a new task and wasting the company’s money. Barbara can’t imagine why Melissa worries about the Waltons’ wasted labor.

That day, Alyssa returns to check on the clearanced $7 polo and finds a stain on it. She is trying to negotiate a further reduction in the cost with the fitting room lady when Howard appears and says there are no employee discounts on clearance items. Barbara says to Alyssa later that it can’t be right when Wal-Mart employees can’t afford to buy a clearanced Wal-Mart shirt.

At an employee meeting, Barbara is listening to another associate complain about how bad a deal the company health insurance is, when Barbara realizes they need a union. She corners other employees outside at cigarette breaks, and finds that no one gets paid overtime, and the health insurance is considered not worth paying for. A twenty-something named Stan is eager to talk to her about wages: he originally wanted to work while studying at a two-year technical school, but work cut into studying and he had to drop out. Another woman, Marlene, says that Wal-Mart would just rather keep hiring new people than treat the ones it has well—it’s constantly bringing new people in for orientation.

Though Barbara thinks any union could help somewhat, she doesn’t believe that unions are a cure-all. She really just wants to puncture the fantasy of the Wal-Mart “family,” with the rhetoric of “servant leaders” and “guests.” She’s also discovering how monotonous a lot of low-wage work can be, which doesn’t apply as much to waitressing or housecleaning. Instead there are just full carts, then empty ones. She looks at her gray, cranky coworkers and wonders how soon she would become like them.

However, then something does happen: 1,450 unionized hotel workers strike at nine local hotels. That day, Barbara is supposed to call two lesser-priced motels as possible options for her to move to from the Comfort Inn, but has left the phone numbers in her car and wonders if she can get away with “time theft” by running to her car. But then Howard tells her she’s behind on her Computer-Based Learning and tells her to get back to the computer area. She heads that way, then sneaks outside to her car, at one point having to dodge into shoes to avoid Howard. But neither of the motels has an opening – her Wal-Mart career is about to end abruptly.

That evening, Barbara tells Melissa she’ll be quitting soon, and Melissa says she might do so too—Barbara knows Melissa might be saying this since it’s so much more pleasant to work with someone you like. She tells Melissa about the book, and Melissa just nods and says she hopes she hasn’t said too many negative things about Wal-Mart. Melissa also says she’s been thinking that $7 an hour isn’t nearly enough for how hard we work, and she’s going to apply for a plastics factory where she can hopefully get $9.

At Barbara’s last break, she and one other woman are watching TV in the break room when the local news turns to the hotel strike. A senator is shaking hands with the son of a picketer and says he should be proud of his father. The other woman jumps up and waves her fist. She ends up telling Barbara about her daughter, her long hours, and her inability to save. Barbara says she still thinks they could have done something together if she could have afforded to work at Wal-Mart longer.