Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Alyssa is another target for my crusade. When she returns to check yet again on that $7 polo, she finds a stain on it. What could she get off for that? I think 10 percent, and if you add in the 10 percent employee discount, we’d be down to $5.60. I’m trying to negotiate a 20 percent price reduction with the fitting room lady when—rotten luck!—Howard shows up and announces that there are no reductions and no employee discounts on clearanced items. Those are the rules. Alyssa looks crushed, and I tell her, when Howard’s out of sight, that there’s something wrong when you’re not paid enough to buy a Wal-Mart shirt, a clearanced Wal-Mart shirt with a stain on it. “I hear you,” she says, and admits Wal-Mart isn’t working for her either, if the goal is to make a living.

  Then I get a little reckless. When an associate meeting is announced over the loudspeaker that afternoon, I decide to go, although most of my coworkers stay put. I don’t understand the purpose of these meetings, which occur every three days or so and consist largely of attendance taking, unless it’s Howard’s way of showing us that there’s only one of him compared to so many of us. I’m just happy to have a few minutes to sit down or, in this case, perch on some fertilizer bags since we’re meeting in lawn and garden today, and chat with whoever shows up, today a gal from the optical department. She’s better coifed and made up than most of us female associates—forced to take the job because of a recent divorce, she tells me, and sorry now that she’s found out how crummy the health insurance is. There follows a long story about preexisting conditions and deductibles and her COBRA running out. I listen vacantly because, like most of the other people in my orientation group, I hadn’t opted for the health insurance—the employee contribution seemed too high. “You know what we need here?” I finally respond. “We need a union.” There it is, the word is out. Maybe if I hadn’t been feeling so footsore I wouldn’t have said it, and I probably wouldn’t have said it either if we were allowed to say “hell” and “damn” now and then or, better yet, “shit.” But no one has outright banned the word union and right now it’s the most potent couple of syllables at hand. “We need something,” she responds.

  After that, there’s nothing to stop me. I’m on a mission now: Raise the questions! Plant the seeds! Breaks finally have a purpose beyond getting off my feet. There are hundreds of workers here—I never do find out how many—and sooner or later I’ll meet them all. I reject the break room for this purpose because the TV inhibits conversation, and for all I know that’s what it’s supposed to do. Better to go outdoors to the fenced-in smoking area in front of the store. Smokers, in smoke-free America, are more likely to be rebels; at least that was true at The Maids, where the nonsmokers waited silently in the office for work to begin, while the smokers out on the sidewalk would be having a raucous old time. Besides, you can always start the ball rolling by asking for a light, which I have to do anyway when the wind is up. The next question is, “What department are you in?” followed by, “How long have you worked here?”—from which it’s an obvious segue to the business at hand. Almost everyone is eager to talk, and I soon become a walking repository of complaints. No one gets paid overtime at Wal-Mart, I’m told, though there’s often pressure to work it.12

  Many feel the health insurance isn’t worth paying for. There’s a lot of frustration over schedules, especially in the case of the evangelical lady who can never get Sunday morning off, no matter how much she pleads. And always there are the gripes about managers: the one who is known for sending new hires home in tears, the one who takes a ruler and knocks everything off what he regards as a messy shelf, so you have to pick it up off the floor and start over.

  Sometimes, I discover, my favorite subject, which is the abysmal rate of pay, seems to be a painful one. Stan, for example, a twenty-something fellow with wildly misaligned teeth, is so eager to talk that he fairly pounces on the seat next to mine on a bench in the smoking area. But when the subject arrives at wages, his face falls. The idea, see, was that he would go to school (he names a two-year technical school) while he worked, but the work cut into studying too much, so he had to drop out and now . . . He stares at the butt-strewed ground, perhaps seeing an eternity in appliances unfold before him. I suggest that what we need is a union, but from the look on his face I might as well have said gumballs or Prozac. Yeah, maybe he’ll go over and apply at Media One, where a friend works and the wages are higher . . . Try school again, umm . . .

  At the other extreme, there are people like Marlene. I am sitting out there talking to a doll-like blonde whom I had taken for a high school student but who, it turns out, has been working full-time since November and is fretting over whether she can afford to buy a car. Marlene comes out for her break, lights a cigarette, and emphatically seconds my opinion of Wal-Mart wages. “They talk about having spirit,” she says, referring to management, “but they don’t give us any reason to have any spirit.” In her view, Wal-Mart would rather just keep hiring new people than treating the ones it has decently. You can see for yourself there’s a dozen new people coming in for orientation every day—which is true. Wal-Mart’s appetite for human flesh is insatiable; we’ve even been urged to recruit any Kmart employees we may happen to know. They don’t care that they’ve trained you or anything, Marlene goes on, they can always get someone else if you complain. Emboldened by her vehemence, I risk the red-hot word again. “I know this goes against the whole Wal-Mart philosophy, but we could use a union here.” She grins, so I push on: “It’s not just about money, it’s about dignity.” She nods fiercely, lighting a second cigarette from her first. Put that woman on the organizing committee at once, I direct my imaginary coconspirators as I leave.

  All right, I’m not a union organizer anymore than I’m Wal-Mart “management material,” as Isabelle has hinted. In fact, I don’t share the belief, held by many union staffers, that unionization would be a panacea. Sure, almost any old union would boost wages and straighten out some backbones here, but I know that even the most energetic and democratic unions bear careful watching by their members. The truth, which I can’t avoid acknowledging when I’m in those vast, desertlike stretches between afternoon breaks, is that I’m just amusing myself, and in what seems like a pretty harmless way. Someone has to puncture the prevailing fiction that we’re a “family” here, we “associates” and our “servant leaders,” held together solely by our commitment to the “guests.” After all, you’d need a lot stronger word than dysfunctional to describe a family where a few people get to eat at the table while the rest—the “associates” and all the dark-skinned seamstresses and factory workers worldwide who make the things we sell—lick up the drippings from the floor: psychotic would be closer to the mark.13 And someone has to flush out the mysterious “we” lurking in the “our” in the “Our people make the difference” statement we wear on our backs. It might as well be me because I have nothing to lose, less than nothing, in fact. For each day that I fail to find cheaper quarters, which is every day now, I am spending $49.95 for the privilege of putting clothes away at Wal-Mart. At this rate, I’ll have burned through the rest of the $1,200 I’ve allotted for my life in Minneapolis in less than a week.

  I could use some amusement. I have been discovering a great truth about low-wage work and probably a lot of medium-wage work, too—that nothing happens, or rather the same thing always happens, which amounts, day after day, to nothing. This law doesn’t apply so strictly to the service jobs I’ve held so far. In waitressing, you always have new customers to study; even housecleaning offers the day’s parade of houses to explore. But here—well, you know what I do and how it gets undone and how I just start all over and do it again. How did I think I was going to survive in a factory, where each minute is identical to the next one, and not just each day? There will be no crises here, except perhaps in the pre-Christmas rush. There will be no “Code M,” meaning “hostage situation,” and probably no Code F or T (I’m guessing on these letters, which I didn’t write down during my note taking at orientation and
which may be a company secret anyway), meaning fire or tornado—no opportunities for courage or extraordinary achievement or sudden evacuations of the store. Those breaking-news moments when a disgruntled former employee shoots up the place or a bunch of people get crushed in an avalanche of piled-up stock are one-in-a-million events. What my life holds is carts—full ones, then empty ones, then full ones again.

  You could get old pretty fast here. In fact, time does funny things when there are no little surprises to mark it off into memorable chunks, and I sense that I’m already several years older than I was when I started. In the one full-length mirror in ladies’ wear, a medium-tall figure is hunched over a cart, her face pinched in absurd concentration—surely not me. How long before I’m as gray as Ellie, as cranky as Rhoda, as shriveled as Isabelle? When even a high-sodium fast-food diet can’t keep me from needing to pee every hour, and my feet are putting some podiatrist’s kid through college? Yes, I know that any day now I’m going to return to the variety and drama of my real, Barbara Ehrenreich life. But this fact sustains me only in the way that, say, the prospect of heaven cheers a terminally ill person: it’s nice to know, but it isn’t much help from moment to moment. What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re actually selling is your life.

  Then something happens, not to me and not at Wal-Mart but with dazzling implications nonetheless. It’s a banner headline in the Star Tribune: 1,450 hotel workers, members of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, strike nine local hotels. A business writer in the Pioneer Press, commenting on this plus a Teamsters’ strike at the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant and a march by workers demanding union recognition at a St. Paul meatpacking plant, rubs his eyes and asks, “What’s going on here?” When I arrive for work that day I salvage the newspaper from the trash can just outside the store entrance—which isn’t difficult because the trash can is overflowing as usual and I don’t have to dig down very far. Then I march that newspaper back to the break room, where I leave it face up on a table, in case anyone’s missed the headline. This new role—bearer of really big news!—makes me feel busy and important. At ladies’, I relate the news to Melissa, adding that the hotel workers already earn over a dollar an hour more than we do and that that hasn’t stopped them from striking for more. She blinks a few times, considering, then Isabelle comes up and announces that the regional manager will be visiting our store tomorrow, so everything has to be “zoned to the nth degree.” The day is upon us.

  I have a lot more on my mind than the challenge of organizing the Faded Glory jeans shelves. At about six I’m supposed to call two motels charging only $40 a day, where something may have opened up, but I realize I’ve left the phone numbers in the car. I don’t want to use up any breaks fetching them—not today, with the strike news to talk about. Do I dare engage in some major time theft? And how can I get out without Isabelle noticing? She’s already caught me folding the jeans the wrong way—you do them in thirds, with the ankles on the inside, not on the outside—and has come by to check a second time. It is, of all people, Howard who provides me with an out, suddenly appearing at my side to inform me that I’m way behind in my CBLs. New employees are supposed to make their way through the CBL training modules by leaving the floor with the permission of their supervisors, and I had been doing so in a halfhearted way—getting through cardboard-box opening, pallet loading, and trash compacting—until the program jammed. Now it’s been fixed, he says, and I’m to get back to the computer immediately. This gets me out of ladies’ but puts me a lot farther from the store exit. I apply myself to a module in which Sam Walton waxes manic about the perpetual inventory system, then I cautiously get up from the computer to see if Howard is anywhere around. Good, the way is clear. I am walking purposefully toward the front of the store when I catch sight of him walking in the same direction, about one hundred feet to my left. I dart into shoes, emerging to see him still moving in a path parallel to mine. I dodge him again by going into bras, then tacking right to the far side of ladies’. I’ve seen this kind of thing in the movies, where the good guy eludes the bad one in some kind of complicated public space, but I never imagined doing it myself.

  Back in the store with the numbers in my vest pocket, I decide to steal a few more minutes and make my calls on company time from the pay phone near layaway. The first motel doesn’t answer, which is not uncommon in your low-rate places. On a whim I call Caroline to see if she’s on strike: no, not her hotel. But she laughs as she tells me that last night on the TV news she saw a manager from the hotel where she used to work. He’s a white guy who’d enjoyed reminding her that she was the first African American to be hired for anything above a housekeeping job and here he was on TV, reduced to pushing a broom while the regular broom pushers walked the picket line. I’m dialing the second motel when Howard reappears. Why aren’t I at the computer? he wants to know, giving me his signature hate smile. “Break,” I say, flashing him what is known to primatologists as a “fear grin”—half teeth baring and half grimace. If you’re going to steal, you better be prepared to lie. He can find out in a minute, of course, by checking to see if I’m actually punched out. I could be written up, banished to bras, called in for a talking-to by a deeply disappointed Roberta. But the second motel has no room for another few days, which means that, for purely financial reasons, my career at Wal-Mart is about to come to a sudden end anyway.

  When Melissa is getting ready to leave work at six, I tell her I’m quitting, possibly the next day. Well then, she thinks she’ll be going too, because she doesn’t want to work here without me. We both look at the floor. I understand that this is not a confession of love, just a practical consideration. You don’t want to work with people who can’t hold up their end or whom you don’t like being with, and you don’t want to keep readjusting to new ones. We exchange addresses, including my real and permanent one. I tell her about the book I’m working on and she nods, not particularly surprised, and says she hopes she hasn’t said “too many bad things about Wal-Mart.” I assure her that she hasn’t and that she’ll be well disguised anyway. Then she tells me she’s been thinking about it, and $7 an hour isn’t enough for how hard we work after all, and she’s going to apply at a plastics factory where she hopes she can get $9.

  At ten that night I go to the break room for my final break, too footsore to walk out to the smoking area, and sit down with my feet up on the bench. My earlier break, the one I’d committed so many crimes to preserve, had been a complete bust, with no other human around but a management-level woman from accounting. I have that late-shift shut-in feeling that there’s no world beyond the doors, no problem greater than the mystery items remaining at the bottom of my cart. There’s only one other person in the break room anyway, a white woman of maybe thirty, watching TV, and I don’t have the energy to start a conversation, even with the rich topic of the strike at hand.

  And then, by the grace of the God who dictated the Sermon on the Mount to Jesus, who watches over Melissa and sparrows everywhere, the TV picks up on the local news and the news is about the strike. A picketer with a little boy tells the camera, “This is for my son. I’m doing this for my son.” Senator Paul Wellstone is standing there too. He shakes the boy’s hand, and says, “You should be proud of your father.” At this my sole companion jumps up, grinning, and waves a fist in the air at the TV set. I give her the rapid two-index-fingers-pointing-down signal that means “Here! Us! We could do that too!” She bounds over to where I’m sitting—if I were feeling peppier I would have gone over to her—leans into my face, and says, “Damn right!” I don’t know whether it’s my feet or the fact that she said “damn,” or what, but I find myself tearing up. She talks well past my legal break time and possibly hers—about her daughter, how she’s sick of working long hours and never getting enough time with her, and what does this lead to anyway, when you can’t make enough to save?

  I still think we could have done something, she a
nd I, if I could have afforded to work at Wal-Mart a little longer.

  1 The St. Paul–based Jobs Now Coalition estimated that, in 1997, a “living wage” for a single parent supporting a single child in the Twin Cities metro area was $11.77 an hour. This estimate was based on monthly expenses that included $266 for food (all meals cooked and eaten at home), $261 for child care, and $550 for rent (“The Cost of Living in Minnesota: A Report by the Jobs Now Coalition on the Minimum Cost of Basic Needs for Minnesota Families in 1997”). No one has updated this “living wage” to take into account the accelerating Twin Cities rent inflation of 2000 (see page 140).

  2 There are many claims for workplace drug testing: supposedly, it results in reduced rates of accidents and absenteeism, fewer claims on health insurance plans, and increased productivity. However, none of these claims has been substantiated, according to a 1999 report from the American Civil Liberties Union, “Drug Testing: A Bad Investment.” Studies show that preemployment testing does not lower absenteeism, accidents, or turnover and (at least in the high-tech workplaces studied) actually lowered productivity—presumably due to its negative effect on employee morale. Furthermore, the practice is quite costly. In 1990, the federal government spent $11.7 million to test 29,000 federal employees. Since only 153 tested positive, the cost of detecting a single drug user was $77,000. Why do employers persist in the practice? Probably in part because of advertising by the roughly $2 billion drug-testing industry, but I suspect that the demeaning effect of testing may also hold some attraction for employers.

  3 The last few years have seen a steady decline in the number of affordable apartments nationwide. In 1991 there were forty-seven affordable rental units available to every one hundred low-income families, while by 1997 there were only thirty-six such units for every one hundred families (“Rental Housing Assistance—The Worsening Crisis: A Report to Congress on Worst-Case Housing Needs,” Housing and Urban Development Department, March 2000). No national—or even reliable local—statistics are available, but apparently more and more of the poor have been reduced to living in motels. Census takers distinguish between standard motels, such as those that tourists stay in, and residential motels, which rent on a weekly basis, usually to long-term tenants. But many motels contain mixed populations or change from one type to the other depending on the season. Long-term motel residents are almost certainly undercounted, since motel owners often deny access to census takers and the residents themselves may be reluctant to admit they live in motels, crowded in with as many as four people or more in a room (Willoughby Mariano, “The Inns and Outs of the Census,” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2000).