Nickel and Dimed

The core objection is the premise: “a real poor person does not have a couple grand to ‘start' with,” which makes the project “a half-assed, anthropological slumming vacation,” with the exit visible in the deadpan reply she gets when she comes clean: “So you won't be here to cover your shift tomorrow?” A month per job is not long enough, and readers ask flatly “what do you find out in a month?” Some judge her “a bit of a wimp” as a muckraker, pulling punches rather than delivering an exposé. The central finding is not news to anyone who has lived it, and the voice “feels too detached.” Hostile readers dismiss the whole as a “bleeding-heart socialist” exercise, “socialist propaganda—full of rhetorical tricks and short on evidence.”