Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

  Nothing, I note, about providing a service or healing the sick. In fact, compared with Wal-Mart’s unctuous service ethic, Todd’s emphasis on the bottom line is positively refreshing. We will be independent contractors, he tells us, not employees, which means, “if you lie to a customer the company is not responsible.” Even, I wonder, if the lies are part of the sales pitch the company has taught you? It’s very simple, Todd assures us, just a “matter of taking people who have a very serious problem, though probably not anywhere near as serious as they think it is, and leaving them happy.” Any questions? None of this has made any sense to me at all, but I limit myself to asking what the product is, assuming there is some kind of product involved. Todd opens a cardboard box that I had not noticed sitting on the floor near his feet: a squat, slightly menacing-looking appliance he introduces as the “Filter Queen.” “So this is a selling job?” someone asks. “No,” Todd says with some vehemence. “We have a product and if they want it we give it to them”—though he can’t mean give it to them for free. Now we are to have our personal three-minute interviews. When my turn comes, he asks why I want to do this and I say something, without thinking, about wanting to help people with asthma. Where do I think I am, Wal-Mart? Because when I call at the designated time two hours later, I’m told there’s no job for me now, although I have made it to the waiting list. Maybe it was the residency issue that did me in, though I suspect it was the misplaced hypocrisy.

  Meanwhile, there is the increasingly desperate apartment search. Whatever else I am doing at any point in this story, you need to picture me waiting for a call or looking for a chance to call some rental agency for a second or third or fourth time. Now that we’re into the weekdays I sometimes get live humans on the other end of the line, but they are disdainful or discouraging. One directs me to a throwaway apartment directory available in boxes on the sidewalk, but its offerings all include hot tubs and on-site gyms and go for over $1,000 a month. Another tells me that I’ve picked a bad time to come to Minneapolis; the vacancy rate is less than 1 percent, and if we’re talking about affordable—why, it might be as low as a tenth of that. Listings in the Star Tribune are meager or nonexistent. No one returns my calls. Besides, it is dawning on me belatedly that Minneapolis is far vaster than Key West or Portland, Maine, and that my two live job possibilities—Wal-Mart and Menards—are separated by about thirty miles. My appetite for navigating the Twin Cities highways has been dwindling rapidly. Everywhere I go, some fellow or other who has never heard of Minnesota nice is stalking me in his pickup truck, making me covet the bumper sticker I see more than once: “If you’re not a hemorrhoid, get off my ass.” Nor is the leading classic rock station turning out to be sufficiently supportive. I can handle seventy-five-mile-per-hour tailgaters on Creedence Clearwater Revival or even ZZ Top, but the Eagles and the Doobie Brothers are just no help. So one thing I do not want is to live at a hair-raising distance from my job, assuming, of course, that I get a job.

  There is one possibility—one place in the entire Twin Cities that rents “affordable” furnished apartments on a weekly or monthly basis—and this place, the Hopkins Park Plaza, becomes the focus of my residential yearnings for the next three weeks, my personal Shangri-La. On my third call (the first two calls were not returned), I reach Hildy, who doesn’t think there’s anything at the moment, but I might as well come out and pay the application fee, which is $20 in cash. When I find the couple of two-story brick buildings that constitute the Park Plaza, several other apartment seekers—a middle-aged white guy with auburn dyed hair, a young Hispanic man (it’s Latino in California, Hispanic here), an older white woman—are waiting for Hildy too, which explains why she doesn’t return calls: the market is entirely on her side. The place, when I finally get taken around by Hildy, seems OK, although the corridors tend to be dark, noisy, and permeated with kitchen-waste smells. I can have a room without a kitchenette right now if I want, but it’s in the basement and the price—$144 a week—seems a little steep. So I decide to wait for one with a kitchenette to open up—any day now, Hildy assures me, turnover is dependably high. This seems like a prudent and thrifty decision at the moment, but it turns out to be a major mistake.

  I decide there must be something I am doing wrong, some cue I am missing. Budgie’s owners had been confident that Apartment Search would find me a place. When I call another friend of a friend, a professor at a college in St. Paul who has briefed me on the Twin Cities’ industrial history, he concedes to being aware of an affordable-housing “crisis” but has no idea what I should do. Those rental agents who are kind enough to talk to me all recommend the same thing: find a motel that rents by the week and stay there until something opens up.3 So, through multiple calls, I arrive at a list of eleven motels in the Twin Cities area, all of them of the non-brand-name variety, offering weekly rates. The rates, though, are not anybody’s definition of “affordable,” ranging from $200 a week at the Hill View in Shakopee to $295 at the Twin Lakes in southern Minneapolis, and many of these places are full. I head for the Hill View, which wants a $60 cash deposit. I drive and I drive. I go off the map, I leave suburbs and commercial strips far behind, I enter the open fields, which make for a nice change, drivingwise—but to live in? The vicinity of the Hill View contains no diners, no fast-food joints or grocery stores, no commercial establishments at all except for a couple of agricultural-equipment warehouses. The distance is unacceptable; as is the room, when I get to see it: no microwave, no fridge, hardly any space not occupied by the bed. And what would I do if I didn’t feel like being in bed—invite myself in for a tour of the Caterpillar parts warehouse?

  Twin Lakes (not its real name) is at least in Minneapolis. There the East Indian owner tells me that all his residents are long-term, working people and that I can have a room on the second floor, where I won’t have to keep the drapes shut during the day for privacy. Again, no fridge or microwave. Weakly, I tell him I’ll take it and will move in in a couple of days. No problem. He even waives the deposit. But I have a bad feeling about the place, partly because everything looks gray and stained and partly because there’s a deranged-looking guy hanging out by the coin-op washer-dryer who follows me with bloodshot blue eyes.

  On the job front, though, things are moving along briskly. I had been told at Menards to show up for “orientation” at ten o’clock Wednesday morning, and since I assume that my being hired is conditional on passing the drug test, I call to confirm the appointment. Yes, they’re expecting me—I hope not just for the purpose of denouncing me as a chemical misfit. But the orientation is friendly and upbeat. Lee-Ann, a worn-looking blonde in her forties, and I sit across a table from Walt, who lays out the main points in a jolly, offhand way: Be nice to the guests, even when they get irate because they can’t return things, and they’re always trying to return things. Don’t be absent without calling in. Watch out for a certain top manager, who hits on women when he visits the store and generally acts like “a shit.” We will need to wear belts, to which a knife (for opening cardboard boxes, I suppose) and a tape measure will be attached, and the cost of these items, which he pushes across the table to us, will be deducted from our first paycheck. And oh yes, we will be getting “little presents” now and then—ballpoint pens, coffee mugs, T-shirts promoting seasonal items. Then Walt hands us our vests and our ID badges, and I am touched to see that he has made up two for me, one with “Barbara” and another with “Barb.” I can take my choice.

  When Walt leaves the room for a moment, I turn to Lee-Ann and say, “Does this mean we’re hired?” Because it seems odd to me that no offer has been made or accepted. “Looks like,” she says, and tells me that she hasn’t even taken her drug test. She went to the testing place, but she didn’t have any photo ID because her wallet was stolen, and of course they wouldn’t test her without photo ID. Then Walt comes back and takes me out on the floor to meet Steve, a “really great guy,” who will be my supervisor in plumbing. But here, on the sales floor, doubt rushes in
. The shelves of plumbing equipment, and there seem to be acres of them, contain not a single item I can name, which gives me an idea of what it feels like to be aphasic. Would I be able to get by with pointing and grunting? Steve’s smile seems more like a smirk, as if he’s reading my mind and finding not a speck of plumbing knowledge lodged within it. Start Friday, he says, shift is noon to eleven. I think I haven’t heard him right, nor can I quite believe the wage Walt tells me I’ll be getting—not $8.50 but an incredible $10 an hour.

  Now I don’t need Wal-Mart anymore, I think, although it turns out they need me. Roberta calls to tell me, in fulsome tones, that my “drug screen is fine” and that I’m due in tomorrow at three for orientation. The test result does not have the desired effect of making me feel absolved or even clean. In fact I feel irritated and can’t help wondering whether I could have gotten the same result without spending $30 and three days on detox and bloat. I ask her what the pay is—it should be noted that she does not offer this information herself—and when she says $7 an hour, I think: OK, case closed. But I decide, in the spirit of caution and inquiry, to attend the Wal-Mart orientation anyway. This turns out, for unforeseen physiological reasons, to be another major mistake.

  For sheer grandeur, scale, and intimidation value, I doubt if any corporate orientation exceeds that of Wal-Mart. I have been told that the process will take eight hours, which will include two fifteen-minute breaks and one half-hour break for a meal, and will be paid for like a regular shift. When I arrive, dressed neatly in khakis and clean T-shirt, as befits a potential Wal-Mart “associate,” I find there are ten new hires besides myself, mostly young and Caucasian, and a team of three, headed by Roberta, to do the “orientating.” We sit around a long table in the same windowless room where I was interviewed, each with a thick folder of paperwork in front of us, and hear Roberta tell once again about raising six children, being a “people person,” discovering that the three principles of Wal-Mart philosophy were the same as her own, and so on. We begin with a video, about fifteen minutes long, on the history and philosophy of Wal-Mart, or, as an anthropological observer might call it, the Cult of Sam. First young Sam Walton, in uniform, comes back from the war. He starts a store, a sort of five-and-dime; he marries and fathers four attractive children; he receives a Medal of Freedom from President Bush, after which he promptly dies, making way for the eulogies. But the company goes on, yes indeed. Here the arc of the story soars upward unstoppably, pausing only to mark some fresh milestone of corporate expansion. 1992: Wal-Mart becomes the largest retailer in the world. 1997: Sales top $100 billion. 1998: The number of Wal-Mart associates hits 825,000, making Wal-Mart the largest private employer in the nation. Each landmark date is accompanied by a clip showing throngs of shoppers, swarms of associates, or scenes of handsome new stores and their adjoining parking lots. Over and over we hear in voiceover or see in graphic display the “three principles,” which are maddeningly, even defiantly, nonparallel: “respect for the individual, exceeding customers’ expectations, strive for excellence.”

  “Respect for the individual” is where we, the associates, come in, because vast as Wal-Mart is, and tiny as we may be as individuals, everything depends on us. Sam always said, and is shown saying, that “the best ideas come from the associates”—for example, the idea of having a “people greeter,” an elderly employee (excuse me, associate) who welcomes each customer as he or she enters the store. Three times during the orientation, which began at three and stretches to nearly eleven, we are reminded that this brainstorm originated in a mere associate, and who knows what revolutions in retailing each one of us may propose? Because our ideas are welcome, more than welcome, and we are to think of our managers not as bosses but as “servant leaders,” serving us as well as the customers. Of course, all is not total harmony, in every instance, between associates and their servant-leaders. A video on “associate honesty” shows a cashier being caught on videotape as he pockets some bills from the cash register. Drums beat ominously as he is led away in handcuffs and sentenced to four years.

  The theme of covert tensions, overcome by right thinking and positive attitude, continues in the twelve-minute video entitled You’ve Picked a Great Place to Work . Here various associates testify to the “essential feeling of family for which Wal-Mart is so well-known,” leading up to the conclusion that we don’t need a union. Once, long ago, unions had a place in American society, but they “no longer have much to offer workers,” which is why people are leaving them “by the droves.” Wal-Mart is booming; unions are declining: judge for yourself. But we are warned that “unions have been targeting Wal-Mart for years.” Why? For the dues money of course. Think of what you would lose with a union: first, your dues money, which could be $20 a month “and sometimes much more.” Second, you would lose “your voice” because the union would insist on doing your talking for you. Finally, you might lose even your wages and benefits because they would all be “at risk on the bargaining table.” You have to wonder—and I imagine some of my teenage fellow orientees may be doing so—why such fiends as these union organizers, such outright extortionists, are allowed to roam free in the land.

  There is more, much more than I could ever absorb, even if it were spread out over a semester-long course. On the reasonable assumption that none of us is planning to go home and curl up with the “Wal-Mart Associate Handbook,” our trainers start reading it out loud to us, pausing every few paragraphs to ask, “Any questions?” There never are. Barry, the seventeen-year-old to my left, mutters that his “butt hurts.” Sonya, the tiny African American woman across from me, seems frozen in terror. I have given up on looking perky and am fighting to keep my eyes open. No nose or other facial jewelry, we learn; earrings must be small and discreet, not dangling; no blue jeans except on Friday, and then you have to pay $1 for the privilege of wearing them. No “grazing,” that is, eating from food packages that somehow become open; no “time theft.” This last sends me drifting off in a sci-fi direction: And as the time thieves headed back to the year 3420, loaded with weekends and days off looted from the twenty-first century . . . Finally, a question. The old guy who is being hired as a people greeter wants to know, “What is time theft?” Answer: Doing anything other than working during company time, anything at all. Theft of our time is not, however, an issue. There are stretches amounting to many minutes when all three of our trainers wander off, leaving us to sit there in silence or take the opportunity to squirm. Or our junior trainers go through a section of the handbook, and then Roberta, returning from some other business, goes over the same section again. My eyelids droop and I consider walking out. I have seen time move more swiftly during seven-hour airline delays. In fact, I am getting nostalgic about seven-hour airline delays. At least you can read a book or get up and walk around, take a leak.

  On breaks, I drink coffee purchased at the Radio Grill, as the in-house fast-food place is called, the real stuff with caffeine, more because I’m concerned about being alert for the late-night drive home than out of any need to absorb all the Wal-Mart trivia coming my way. Now, here’s a drug the drug warriors ought to take a little more interest in. Since I don’t normally drink it at all—iced tea can usually be counted on for enough of a kick—the coffee has an effect like reagent-grade Dexedrine: my pulse races, my brain overheats, and the result in this instance is a kind of delirium. I find myself overly challenged by the little kindergarten-level tasks we are now given to do, such as affixing my personal bar code to my ID card, then sticking on the punch-out letters to spell my name. The letters keep curling up and sticking to my fingers, so I stop at “Barb,” or more precisely, “BARB,” drifting off to think of all the people I know who have gentrified their names in recent years—Patsy to Patricia, Dick to Richard, and so forth—while I am going in the other direction. Now we start taking turns going to the computers to begin our CBL, or Computer-Based Learning, and I become transfixed by the HIV-inspired module entitled “Bloodborne Pathogens,” on what to do in
the event that pools of human blood should show up on the sales floor. All right, you put warning cones around the puddles, don protective gloves, etc., but I can’t stop trying to envision the circumstances in which these pools might arise: an associate uprising? a guest riot? I have gone through six modules, three more than we are supposed to do tonight—the rest are to be done in our spare moments over the next few weeks—when one of the trainers gently pries me away from the computer. We are allowed now to leave.

  There follows the worst of many sleepless nights to come. On the drive home along the interstate, a guy doing over eighty passes me on the right at a few angstroms’ distance, making the point that any highway has far more exits than you can see, infinitely many—final exits, that is. At this hour, which is nearly midnight, it takes me fifteen minutes to find a parking place, and another five to walk to the apartment, where I find that Budgie, distraught by my long absence, has gone totally postal. Feathers litter the floor under his cage, and he refuses to return to it even after a generous forty-five minutes of head time. I want to be fresh for my first day in plumbing tomorrow—Menards is still my choice—but a lot of small things have been going wrong, and at this level of finances, nothing wrong is ever quite small enough. My watch battery ran out and I had to spend $11 to get it replaced. My khakis developed a prominent ink stain that took three wash cycles ($3.75) and a treatment with Shout Gel ($1.29) to remove. There was the $20 application fee at the Park Plaza, plus $20 for the belt I need for Menards, purchased only after comparison shopping at a consignment store. And why hadn’t I asked what that knife and tape measure are going to cost? I discover that the phone is no longer taking incoming calls or recording voice mail, so who knows what housing opportunities I have missed. Around two in the morning, I pop a Unisom to counteract the still-raging caffeine, but at five Budgie takes his revenge, greeting the prospect of dawn, which is still comfortably remote, with a series of scandalized squawks.