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Nickel And Dimed Nickel and Dimed The United States of America is the richest nation in the world. Very poor countries look to us for help. We give them clothes, food, and housing. I understand as a rich nation we should help out some of the less fortunate people in the world, but what about the poor people of America. In this book, Ehrenreich, explores what it is like to work for very low wages in America. She learns how it is a very hard job, physically and mentally, on the person struggling to make ends meet. In 1999 and 2000, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress in Key West, Fla., as a cleaning woman and a nursing home aide in Portland, Maine, and in a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, Minn. She first finds out that meeting her rent is a lot more difficult then she thought. As a waitress in Florida, she struggles each month to reach her rent of $675. As rental prices go up in America, people’s wages do not. They struggle, working 7 days a week, most working more than one job, just to meet rent cost. In all three jobs she sees many examples of how the common person struggles each day. She describes full-time workers who sleep in their cars because they cannot afford housing and employees who yearn for the ability to "take a