Yes, Nickel and Dimed Is Banned!

Nickel and Dimed is Barbara Ehrenreich’s firsthand account of trying to survive on minimum-wage jobs in three American cities. In 1998, the journalist and Ph.D. holder worked as a waitress in Key West, a maid in Portland, and a Walmart associate in Minneapolis, documenting how the math of low-wage work simply doesn’t add up. She couldn’t afford rent, healthcare, or adequate food on what she earned. Published by Metropolitan Books in 2001, the book became a bestseller and a staple of college reading lists.

In 2003, North Carolina state legislators held a press conference denouncing the book as a “classic Marxist rant” and “intellectual pornography” after UNC-Chapel Hill assigned it to all incoming freshmen. In Easton, Pennsylvania, a parent challenged it on the AP English reading list in 2011, claiming it promotes “economic fallacies and socialist ideas,” drug use, and belittles Christians. Multiple residents called it “faddish,” “obscene,” and of “no moral value,” though the school board retained it. Challenges followed in Charleston County, South Carolina, and Bedford County, Tennessee.

Why You Should Read This

Ehrenreich went undercover and came back with receipts. Literal receipts. She tracked every dollar earned and spent, showed exactly how a $7/hour paycheck evaporates before it covers a security deposit, let alone food. The book is twenty-plus years old and the math has only gotten worse.

What gets it banned isn’t obscenity or drugs (she mentions coworkers using substances to get through shifts, which is just reporting). It gets banned because it makes people uncomfortable about an economy that depends on millions of workers not being able to afford their own rent. Calling that “socialist” is a way of not having to think about it. The book is assigned in high schools because it teaches critical thinking about systems most students will enter in a few years. Taking it away doesn’t change the reality. It just keeps kids from seeing it clearly before they’re already in it.