vitellan’s Reviews > Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America > Status Update

"Guilt, you may be thinking warily. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to feel? But guilt doesn’t go anywhere near far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame—shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others."

"So if low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace—and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well—you check your civil liberties at the door..."

"What surprised and offended me most about the low-wage workplace (and yes, here all my middle-class privilege is on full display) was the extent to which one is required to surrender one’s basic civil rights and—what boils down to the same thing—self-respect."

"actual humans experience a little more “friction” than marbles do, and the poorer they are, the more constrained their mobility usually is."

"the choice of food as the basis for calculating family budgets seems fairly arbitrary today; we might as well abolish poverty altogether, at least on paper, by defining a subsistence budget as some multiple of average expenditures on comic books or dental floss."

"But the real question is not how well I did at work but how well I did at life in general, which includes eating and having a place to stay. The fact that these are two separate questions needs to be underscored right away."

"a lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. You feel it coming on halfway through a shift or later, and you can interpret it the normal way as a symptom of a kind of low-level illness, curable with immediate rest. Or you can interpret it another way, as a reminder of the hard work you’ve done so far and hence as evidence of how much you are still capable of doing"

"It’s a lot harder, I found, to sort out a human microsystem when you’re looking up at it from the bottom, and, of course, a lot more necessary to do so."

"When a Wal-Mart shows up within a television within a Wal-Mart, you have to question the existence of an outer world."

"“The stronger the economy, the stronger the upward pressure on rents.” So I’m a victim not of poverty but of prosperity. The rich and the poor, who are generally thought to live in a state of harmonious interdependence—the one providing cheap labor, the other providing low-wage jobs—can no longer coexist."