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Living Nickel And Dimed Critical Essay

803 Words4 Pages

He leaves his peers, knowing that his eyes will nevermore meet theirs in the sanctity of a classroom. This young boy, only 17 years of age, was fated to live out his life behind a cash register the day that his father was laid off. Instead of feeling the warm embrace of a desk, he only feels the pain in his back after an 11 hour shift. Instead of hearing the hushed chitter chatter of his classmates, all he can hear is the constant orders of customers being barked at him. This young man is my father. Moreover, there is a copious amount of stories of people struggling to survive. We experience some of those accounts in Nickel and Dimed by journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich, a novel about the working class of America, and also in Living …show more content…

Ehrenreich travels to Florida, Maine, and Minnesota to experience the struggles of the working class first hand. She enters the endeavor with a limited amount of money only used to kickstart her journey, and a tenacity that could only be extinguished by the working class itself. She comes face to face with issues such as a weak job market, a lack of housing vacancy, exhaustion, and simply being able to afford food. Four college students from California also experience similar obstacles when they travel to Peña Blanca, Guatemala in the documentary, Living on One Dollar. Best friends Chris, Zack, Sean, and Ryan had wanted to get a better understanding of poverty and privilege so they decided to voyage to the poverty ridden village of Peña Blanca. They had also made a system that would simulate the uncertainty of income to truly get the full experience. They would fill a hat with numbers ranging from zero to nine, and they would draw from the hat each day. The number they received would be the amount of money they would limit themselves to. These four college students struggled with finances, disease, and the emotional toll that comes along with an experience like

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