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Three, Selling in Minnesota

Summary

Ehrenreich next travels to Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has done some research and learned that Minneapolis has entry level jobs at $8 an hour and apartments for $400 per month. Initially, she stays at a friend’s small apartment while looking for work and a job. She applies to Wal-Mart and Menard’s (a home improvement chain store). She is concerned that she will fail her mandatory drug test (for both jobs) as she has used marijuana recently. After researching the matter online, she purchases a detox remedy at a local GNC and starts drinking large amounts of water. 

While waiting to hear back from potential employers and searching the housing market, she contacts Caroline, the aunt of Ehrenreich’s friend in New York. Caroline is African-American, works for $9 an hour, and has uprooted her life, including her children, to move to a city without support. Caroline has accomplished what Ehrenreich is simulating in her project. Caroline and her current husband make $40,000 a year combined, but still live in an apartment with many problems. Caroline tells Ehrenreich about the difficulties she experienced moving from city to city with her children. Caroline then gives her a container of homemade chicken stew.

Ehrenreich goes to two different locations for her drug tests and continues to look for an affordable apartment. She learns that Minneapolis has a vacancy rate of less than 1 percent. She settles on long-term hotel residence at Twin Lakes, where she does not have a refrigerator or microwave. She is invited to orientation at Menards, where she is told how to treat customers and is given a name tag and vest. She is told that a utility knife and tape measure will be deducted from her first paycheck. Ehrenreich is then told that her first shift will be Friday, in the plumbing department, and she will be paid $10 an hour.

Ehrenreich then attends a Wal-Mart orientation, even though she plans to work solely at Menards, as Wal-Mart is only offering $7 an hour. The Wal-Mart orientation is a full day and very boring. During the orientation, she is told that “unions have been targeting Wal-Mart for years” and that she has nothing to gain from being part of a labor union. Ehrenreich drinks coffee to stay awake for the orientation shift, but then has trouble sleeping. The next day, she is contacted by Menards. The person on the phone tells her that she has an eleven-hour shift for her first day and does not believe that Ehrenreich was told she would receive $10 an hour. Ehrenreich decides to work solely for Wal-Mart, reflecting that the interview and orientation process leaves little room for potential employees to argue for better wages.

When Ehrenreich tries to move into the room at Twin Lakes, she finds that the manager has rented it to someone else. She then contacts the Clearview hotel, which is closer to Wal-Mart. The room available at the Clearview is smaller than Twin Lakes, has no air-conditioning, and has only a single window without a screen. Ehrenreich reports to work at Wal-Mart and is assigned to women’s clothing. She is tasked with maintaining the clothing on the floor and returning items to their respective locations after they have been left at the fitting rooms, returned to the store, or left in a different department. This becomes increasingly challenging, as the floor layout in her department changes regularly. 

Ehrenreich returns to the Clearview to discover that she will have to change rooms because sewage has backed up into the room that she has been staying in. The stress of her “home life” is starting to affect her. At Wal-Mart, she is assigned the 2:00–11:00 p.m. shift—an hour longer than her previous shift. At the end of her shift, an unfamiliar coworker criticizes Ehrenreich for putting a shirt in the wrong location. Tired and frustrated, Ehrenreich snaps back and then realizes that the job is turning her spiteful and callous.

At the Clearview Inn, Ehrenreich is told that she will be charged $55 for additional nights. She tries to find other living arrangements but learns that the Twin Cities are in an affordable-housing crisis. The economic prosperity of the time has created upward pressure on rent, shrinking the stock of affordable housing nationwide. Ehrenreich moves to the Comfort Inn for $50 a night. After contacting several charitable agencies, Ehrenreich receives soap, deodorant, and a collection of food with high sugar content. After explaining that she works at Wal-Mart full time, Ehrenreich is told that she should probably check into a shelter to save for a first month’s rent deposit at a cheap apartment.

Ehrenreich becomes more efficient working in her department at Wal-Mart. She begins to think about the customers and how they create so much work for her, since they never return unpurchased items to their proper locations. She thinks that Wal-Mart not only serves to sell items to customers, but also to provide a place where mothers can go to relieve stress by acting like bratty children. Ehrenreich comes to find that many of the Wal-Mart employees have second and third jobs. She starts spreading the idea among her fellow employees that they should unionize. During the end of her time at Wal-Mart, there is a hotel-workers strike. Admitting that unions should be monitored by their members, she uses her break time to promote the idea of a union to her coworkers. In the end, Ehrenreich can no longer afford to work at Wal-Mart and pay for her hotel room, so she quits.

Analysis

In the third chapter, Ehrenreich shines a light on society’s lack of concern for the mental health of low-wage workers. The personality tests that encourage job applicants to lie are a prime example of this disregard. There is also the constant threat of drug tests that are more likely to detect marijuana use than harder drugs that pass through the body more quickly. Ehrenreich chronicles her own mental-health struggles as she works undercover to show how the stress of low-paying jobs and unfair systems often causes health problems. For example, Ehrenreich experiences stomachaches, a classic sign of mental distress. These stomachaches make it difficult to eat enough food to fuel her day. She also develops the nervous habit of picking at her clothes. She finds herself having unwarranted negative feelings toward customers at Wal-Mart and acknowledges that this version of herself, "Barb," is meaner and more likely to hold a grudge than her normal self. Because of working conditions, low-wage workers are prone to poor mental health, but employers rarely offer support or affordable health insurance.

Ehrenreich illustrates how the difficulty of job-hunting limits upward social mobility for the working poor. For example, when seeking a new job, applicants must repeatedly spend money on transportation and childcare just to attend interviews, and they must take unpaid time off work to complete an application, an interview, and a drug test. The experience of doing this herself helps Ehrenreich realize that the hiring process puts an undue burden of expense on people who are already struggling and makes it difficult for them to attain better-paid employment. Ehrenreich also demonstrates how managers purposefully shuffle people through the hiring process and into orientation without giving them a chance to negotiate pay or benefits, more evidence that the systems inherent in low-wage jobs are unfairly stacked against the workers. When Ehrenreich worries whether she’ll pass a mandatory drug test for a low-wage job, she points out that she doesn’t have to worry about drug tests in her regular job as a journalist. In many ways, society holds low-wage workers to higher standards than their better-paid counterparts, and it also requires that they spend their hard-earned money just for the chance to interview with a potential employer. These are just a few of the obstacles they must hurdle to acquire a better job, proving that society has imposed practices that severely limit low-wage workers’ opportunities for upward mobility. 

Ehrenreich highlights another hurdle for the working poor by chronicling her search for a place to live in Minneapolis. The newspaper lists only one furnished studio in her area, and no one answers the phone at the number provided. When Ehrenreich does find a furnished apartment for rent, she packs up her belongings only to find the room was rented to someone else. Setbacks like these cost low-wage workers time and money, two things they can’t afford to waste. Ehrenreich has no choice but to live at the Clearview Inn, where she endures mold, mouse droppings, unsecure door locks, and no ventilation. Because Ehrenreich can’t find accommodations with a refrigerator or microwave, she spends over $500 on housing and food while earning only $42, proving that low-wage earners are stuck in an unsustainable cycle of being overcharged and underpaid. 

The story of Caroline, Ehrenreich’s friend's aunt who lives in Minneapolis, provides further evidence that the working class faces challenges that make it nearly impossible to better their living and financial situations. Although Caroline and her husband make enough money to be considered middle class, the only neighborhood where they can afford to live is infested with drug dealers. Their ceiling leaks and they use a bucket to fill their toilet tank with water. Caroline and her husband work full time, but the cost of their health insurance is so high that their monthly housing budget suffers. Despite Caroline’s own housing problems, she offers Ehrenreich a place to stay when Ehrenreich can’t secure housing of her own. Caroline’s kind gesture suggests that her less-than-ideal housing situation is what success looks like for the working poor. Caroline doesn’t have much, but she’s able to help others with even less. The gesture also suggests that many poor people are forced to rely on friends and family who are also struggling, which puts yet another financial burden on the working poor.

Ehrenreich’s relationships with Caroline and various coworkers in Minneapolis are evidence of how essential it is for the working poor to have a social network for support. In addition to offering Ehrenreich a place to live, Caroline generously gives her food, and a coworker brings Ehrenreich a sandwich for lunch because she is worried about her. Ehrenreich cites many coworkers who rely on friends and family to provide childcare and transportation so they can go to work every day. Though Ehrenreich’s employer, Wal-Mart, forbids people from socializing at work—in the eyes of the company, socializing is known as “time theft”—a supportive social network is one of the only things keeping their employees afloat. When Ehrenreich tries to plant some seeds of interest in organizing a labor union, she reveals another reason big businesses don’t want their employees to socialize: because it might give them the opportunity and the motivation to come together and demand better treatment. This section of the novel emphasizes how the working poor have learned to rely on each other instead of their employers or broken social systems. 

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