Nickel and Dimed

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Now it’s after seven and time to resume my daily routine at the evening food-gathering phase. The town of Clearview presents only two low-priced options (there are no high-priced options) to its kitchenless residents—a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet or Kentucky Fried Chicken—each with its own entertainment possibilities. If I eat out at the buffet I can watch the large Mexican families or the even larger, in total body mass terms, families of Minnesota Anglos. If I eat KFC in my room, I can watch TV on one of the half dozen available channels. The latter option seems somehow less lonely, especially if I can find one of my favorite programs—Titus or Third Rock from the Sun. Eating is tricky without a table. I put the food on the chest of drawers and place a plastic supermarket bag over my lap, since spills are hard to avoid when you eat on a slant and spills mean time and money at the Laundromat. Tonight I find the new sensation, Survivor, on CBS, where “real people” are struggling to light a fire on their desert island. Who are these nutcases who would volunteer for an artificially daunting situation in order to entertain millions of strangers with their half-assed efforts to survive? Then I remember where I am and why I am here.

  Dinner over, I put the remains in the plastic bag that served as a tablecloth and tie it up tightly to discourage the flies that have free access to my essentially screenless abode. I do my evening things—writing in my journal and reading a novel—then turn out the lights and sit for a while by the open door for some air. The two African American men who live in the room next door have theirs open too, and since it’s sometimes open in the daytime as well, I’ve noticed that their room, like mine, has only one bed. This is no gay tryst, though, because they seem to take turns in the bed, one sleeping in the room and the other one napping in their van outside. I shut the door, put the window down, and undress in the dark so I can’t be seen through the window. I still haven’t found out much about my fellow Clearview dwellers—it’s bad enough being a woman alone, especially a woman rich enough to have a bed of her own, without being nosy on top of that. As far as I can tell, the place isn’t a nest of drug dealers and prostitutes; these are just working people who don’t have the capital to rent a normal apartment. Even the teenagers who worried me at first seem to have mother figures attached to them, probably single mothers I hadn’t seen before because they were at work.

  Finally I lie down and breathe against the weight of unmoving air on my chest. I wake up a few hours later to hear a sound not generated by anyone’s TV: a woman’s clear alto singing two lines of the world’s saddest song, lyrics indecipherable, to the accompaniment of trucks on the highway.

  Morning begins with a trip, by car, to the Holiday gas station’s convenience store, where I buy a pop container full of ice and a packet of two hard-boiled eggs. The ice, a commodity unavailable at the motel, is for iced tea, which I brew by letting tea bags soak in a plastic cup of water overnight. After breakfast I tidy up my room, making the bed, wiping the sink with a wad of toilet paper, and taking the garbage out to the Dump-ster. True, the owner’s wife (or maybe she’s the co-owner) goes around from room to room every morning with a cleaning cart, but her efforts show signs of deep depression or possibly attention deficit disorder. Usually she remembers to replace the thin little towels, which, even when clean, contain embedded hairs and smell like cooking grease, but there’s nothing else, except maybe an abandoned rag or bottle of air freshener, to suggest that she’s been through on her rounds. I picture an ad for a “traditional-minded, hardworking wife,” a wedding in her natal village, then—plop—she’s in Clearview, Minnesota, with an Indian American husband who may not even speak her language, thousands of miles from family, a temple, a sari shop.6 So I clean up myself, then do my hair with enough bobby pins to last through the shift, and head off for work. The idea is to make myself look like someone who’s spent the night in a regular home with kitchen and washer and dryer, not like someone who’s borderline homeless.

  The other point of my domestic rituals and arrangements is to get through the time when I can’t be at work, when it would look weird to be hanging around in the Wal-Mart parking lot or break room. Because home life is more stressful than I have consciously acknowledged, and I would be dreading my upcoming day off if I weren’t confident of spending it on the move to better quarters at the Hopkins Park Plaza. Little nervous symptoms have arisen. Sometimes I get a tummy ache after breakfast, which makes lunch dicey, and there’s no way to get through the shift without at least one major refueling. More disturbing is the new habit of plucking away at my shirt or my khakis with whichever hand can be freed up for the task. I have to stop this. My maternal grandmother, who still lives on, in a fashion, at the age of a hundred and one, was a perfect model of stoicism, but she used to pick at her face and her wrist, creating dark red circular sores, and claimed not to know she was doing it. Maybe it’s an inheritable twitch and I will soon be moving on from fabric to flesh.

  I arrive at work full of bounce, pausing at the fitting room to jolly up the lady on duty—usually the bossy, self-satisfied Rhoda—because the fitting room lady bears the same kind of relation to me as a cook to a server: she can screw me up if she wants, giving me carts contaminated with foreign, nonladies’ items and items not properly folded or hangered. “Here I am,” I announce grandiosely, spreading out my arms. “The day can begin!” For this I get a wrinkled nose from Rhoda and a one-sided grin from Lynne, the gaunt blonde who’s working bras. I search out Ellie, whom I find shooting out new labels from the pricing gun, and ask if there’s anything special I need to be doing. No, just whatever needs to be done. Next I find Melissa to get a report on the cartage so far. Today she seems embarrassed when she sees me: “I probably shouldn’t have done this and you’re going to think it’s really silly . . .” but she’s brought me a sandwich for lunch. This is because I’d told her I was living in a motel almost entirely on fast food, and she felt sorry for me. Now I’m embarrassed, and beyond that overwhelmed to discover a covert stream of generosity running counter to the dominant corporate miserliness. Melissa probably wouldn’t think of herself as poor, but I know she calculates in very small units of currency, twice reminding me, for example, that you can get sixty-eight cents off the specials at the Radio Grill every Tuesday, so a sandwich is something to consider. I set off with my cart, muttering contentedly, “Bobbie Brooks turquoise elastic-waist shorts” and “Faded Glory V-neck red tank top.”

  Then, in my second week, two things change. My shift changes from 10:00–6:00 to 2:00–11:00, the so-called closing shift, although the store remains open 24/7. No one tells me this; I find it out by studying the schedules that are posted, under glass, on the wall outside the break room. Now I have nine hours instead of eight, and although one of them is an unpaid dinner hour, I have a net half an hour a day more on my feet. My two fifteen-minute breaks, which seemed almost superfluous on the 10:00–6:00 shift, now become a matter of urgent calculation. Do I take both before dinner, which is usually about 7:30, leaving an unbroken two-and-a-half-hour stretch when I’m weariest, between 8:30 and 11:00? Or do I try to go two and a half hours without a break in the afternoon, followed by a nearly three-hour marathon before I can get away for dinner? Then there’s the question of how to make the best use of a fifteen-minute break when you have three or more urgent, simultaneous needs—to pee, to drink something, to get outside the neon and into the natural light, and most of all, to sit down. I save about a minute by engaging in a little time theft and stopping at the rest room before I punch out for the break (and, yes, we have to punch out even for breaks, so there’s no padding them with a few stolen minutes). From the time clock it’s a seventy-five-second walk to the store exit; if I stop at the Radio Grill, I could end up wasting a full four minutes waiting in line, not to mention the fifty-nine cents for a small-sized iced tea. So if I treat myself to an outing in the tiny fenced-off area beside the store, the only place where employees are allowed to smoke, I get about nine minutes off my feet.

  The other thing that ha
ppens is that the post–Memorial Day weekend lull definitely comes to an end. Now there are always a dozen or more shoppers rooting around in ladies’, reinforced in the evening by a wave of multigenerational gangs—Grandma, Mom, a baby in the shopping cart, and a gaggle of sullen children in tow. New tasks arise, such as bunching up the carts left behind by customers and steering them to their place in the front of the store every half hour or so. Now I am picking up not only dropped clothes but all the odd items customers carry off from foreign departments and decide to leave with us in ladies’—pillows, upholstery hooks, Pokémon cards, earrings, sunglasses, stuffed animals, even a package of cinnamon buns. And always there are the returns, augmented now by the huge volume of items that have been tossed on the floor or carried fecklessly to inappropriate sites. Sometimes I am lucky to achieve a steady state between replacing the returns and picking up items strewn on the racks and the floor. If I pick up misplaced items as quickly as I replace the returns, my cart never empties and things back up dangerously at the fitting room, where Rhoda or her nighttime replacement is likely to hiss: “You’ve got three carts waiting, Barb. What’s the problem?” Think Sisyphus here or the sorcerer’s apprentice.

  Still, for the first half of my shift, I am the very picture of good-natured helpfulness, fascinated by the multiethnic array of our shoppers—Middle Eastern, Asian, African American, Russian, former Yugoslavian, old-fashioned Minnesota white—and calmly accepting of the second law of thermodynamics, the one that says entropy always wins. Amazingly, I get praised by Isabelle, the thin little seventyish lady who seems to be Ellie’s adjutant: I am doing “wonderfully,” she tells me, and—even better—am “great to work with.” I prance from rack to rack, I preen. But then, somewhere around 6:00 or 7:00, when the desire to sit down becomes a serious craving, a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde transformation sets in. I cannot ignore the fact that it’s the customers’ sloppiness and idle whims that make me bend and crouch and run. They are the shoppers, I am the antishopper, whose goal is to make it look as if they’d never been in the store. At this point, “aggressive hospitality” gives way to aggressive hostility. Their carts bang into mine, their children run amok. Once I stand and watch helplessly while some rug rat pulls everything he can reach off the racks, and the thought that abortion is wasted on the unborn must show on my face, because his mother finally tells him to stop.

  I even start hating the customers for extraneous reasons, such as, in the case of the native Caucasians, their size. I don’t mean just bellies and butts, but huge bulges in completely exotic locations, like the backs of the neck and the knees. This summer, Wendy’s, where I often buy lunch, has introduced the verb biggiesize, as in “Would you like to biggiesize that combo?” meaning double the fries and pop, and something like biggiesizing seems to have happened to the female guest population. All right, everyone knows that midwesterners, and especially those in the lower middle class, are tragically burdened by the residues of decades of potato chips and French toast sticks, and I probably shouldn’t even bring this up. In my early-shift, Dr. Jekyll form, I feel sorry for the obese, who must choose from among our hideous woman-size offerings, our drawstring shorts, and huge horizontally striped tees, which are obviously designed to mock them. But compassion fades as the shift wears on. Those of us who work in ladies’ are for obvious reasons a pretty lean lot—probably, by Minnesota standards, candidates for emergency IV nutritional supplementation—and we live with the fear of being crushed by some wide-body as she hurtles through the narrow passage from Faded Glory to woman size, lost in fantasies involving svelte Kathie Lee sheaths.

  It’s the clothes I relate to, though, not the customers. And now a funny thing happens to me here on my new shift: I start thinking they’re mine, not mine to take home and wear, because I have no such designs on them, just mine to organize and rule over. Same with ladies’ wear as a whole. After 6:00, when Melissa and Ellie go home, and especially after 9:00, when Isabelle leaves, I start to own the place. Out of the way, Sam, this is Bar-Mart now. I patrol the perimeter with my cart, darting in to pick up misplaced and fallen items, making everything look spiffy from the outside. I don’t fondle the clothes, the way customers do; I slap them into place, commanding them to hang straight, at attention, or lie subdued on the shelves in perfect order. In this frame of mind, the last thing I want to see is a customer riffling around, disturbing the place. In fact, I hate the idea of things being sold—uprooted from their natural homes, whisked off to some closet that’s in God-knows-what state of disorder. I want ladies’ wear sealed off in a plastic bubble and trucked away to some place of safety, some museum of retail history.

  One night I come back bone-tired from my last break and am distressed to find a new person, an Asian American or possibly Hispanic woman who can’t be more than four and a half feet tall, folding T-shirts in the White Stag area, my White Stag area. It’s already been a vexing evening. Earlier, when I’d returned from dinner, the evening fitting room lady upbraided me for being late—which I actually wasn’t—and said that if Howard knew, he probably wouldn’t yell at me this time because I’m still pretty new, but if it happened again . . . And I’d snapped back that I could care less if Howard yelled at me, which is a difficult sentiment to fully convey without access to the forbidden four-letter words. So I’m a little wary with this intruder in White Stag and, sure enough, after our minimal introductions, she turns on me.

  “Did you put anything away here today?” she demands.

  “Well, yes, sure.” In fact I’ve put something away everywhere today, as I do on every other day.

  “Because this is not in the right place. See the fabric—it’s different,” and she thrusts the errant item up toward my chest.

  True, I can see that this olive-green shirt is slightly ribbed while the others are smooth. “You’ve got to put them in their right places,” she continues. “Are you checking the UPC numbers?”

  Of course I am not checking the ten or more digit UPC numbers, which lie just under the bar codes—nobody does. What does she think this is, the National Academy of Sciences? I’m not sure what kind of deference, if any, is due here: Is she my supervisor now? Or are we involved in some kind of test to see who will dominate the 9:00–11:00 time period? But I don’t care, she’s pissing me off, messing with my stuff. So I say, only without the numerals or the forbidden curse word, that (1) plenty of other people work here during the day, not to mention all the customers coming through, so why is she blaming me? (2) it’s after 10:00 and I’ve got another cart full of returns to go, and wouldn’t it make more sense if we both worked on the carts, instead of zoning the goddamn T-shirts?

  To which she responds huffily, “I don’t do returns. My job is to fold.”

  A few minutes later I see why she doesn’t do returns—she can’t reach the racks. In fact, she has to use a ladder even to get to the higher shelves. And you know what I feel when I see the poor little mite pushing that ladder around? A surge of evil mirth. I peer around from where I am working in Jordache, hoping to see her go splat.

  I leave that night shaken by my response to the intruder. If she’s a supervisor, I could be written up for what I said, but even worse is what I thought. Am I turning mean here, and is that a normal response to the end of a nine-hour shift? There was another outbreak of mental wickedness that night. I’d gone back to the counter by the fitting room to pick up the next cart full of returns and found the guy who answers the phone at the counter at night, a pensive young fellow in a wheelchair, staring into space, looking even sadder than usual. And my uncensored thought was, At least you get to sit down.

  This is not me, at least not any version of me I’d like to spend much time with, just as my tiny coworker is probably not usually a bitch. She’s someone who works all night and naps during the day when her baby does, I find out later, along with the information that she’s not anyone’s supervisor and is in fact subject to constant criticism by Isabelle when the two overlap. What I have to face is that “
Barb,” the name on my ID tag, is not exactly the same person as Barbara. “Barb” is what I was called as a child, and still am by my siblings, and I sense that at some level I’m regressing. Take away the career and the higher education, and maybe what you’re left with is this original Barb, the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real if her father hadn’t managed to climb out of the mines. So it’s interesting, and more than a little disturbing, to see how Barb turned out—that she’s meaner and slyer than I am, more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I’d hoped.

  On the day of my move to the Hopkins Park Plaza, I wake up savoring the thought of the perishables I’m going to stock my refrigerator with: mayonnaise, mustard, chicken breasts. But when I get there Hildy is gone and the woman in the towering black beehive who has taken her place says I didn’t understand, the room won’t be available until next week and I should call first to be sure. Had I really been so befogged by wishful thinking that I’d “misunderstood” what had seemed to be a fairly detailed arrangement (bring your money down at nine on Saturday, you can move in at four, etc.)? Or had someone else just beat me to it? Never mind, I’ve been clearheaded enough to know all along that the Park Plaza apartment with kitchenette, at $179 a week, was not a long-term option on Wal-Mart’s $7 an hour. My plan had been to add a weekend job, which I have been tentatively offered at a Rainbow supermarket near the apartment where I originally stayed, at close to $8 an hour. Between the two jobs, I would be making about $320 a week after taxes, so that the $179 in rent would have amounted to about 55 percent of my income, which is beginning to look “affordable.”7 But Rainbow also falls through; they decide they want me to work part-time five days a week, not just on weekends. Furthermore, I have no control at the moment over what my days off will be. Howard has scheduled me to have Friday off one week, Tuesday and Wednesday the next, and I would have to do some serious sucking up to arrive at a more stable and congenial schedule.