Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days – Living on Minimum Wage

If you caught the premier episode of Morgan Spurlock’s, of Super Size Me fame (you can check out his blog here), 30 days on the FX Channel then you saw the plight of your average, minimum-wage, hard-working but barely scrape by Joe Schmoe. The episode was amazing as it happened to hit upon a lot of the major issues minimum wage earners tackle: keeping up with rent, dealing with health issues without insurance, among other issues. It was shown at 10pm but then had an encore presentation at 11pm. I don’t know if it’ll be shown again but it’s a show you definitely should find time to watch.

The story begins with Morgan and his girlfriend locking up all of their savings, credit cards, etc. in a lockbox and starting the 30 days with only one week of minimum wage ($5.15/hr) savings, it amounted to something like under $150 each. With that, they moved to Columbus, Ohio because it represented mainstream America to him. I didn’t know this but Ohio has 4 of the 25 poorest cities in all of America (how they calculate that, I’m not sure).

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