Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(US) petty, small-time, insignificant.

1922		Joyce Ulysses 406: The Deity ain’t no nickel dime bumshow.
1946		E.C. Marshall ‘The High-Powered Corpse’ in Ten Detective Aces June 🌐 Thin streams of incense filled the air. Not the nickel-and-dime olfactory horrors, but real temple powders.
1955		B. Schulberg On the Waterfront (1964) 36: Calling their president [...] ‘Nickel and Dime Willie’ because his contracts with the shipping association always resulted in notoriously paltry wage increases.
1967		P. Thomas Down These Mean Streets (1970) 75: But the lemonade syndicate, like copping milk bottles, was nickel and dime.
1970		E. Thompson Garden of Sand (1981) 118: I’m no nickel-and-dime dolly. Gimme a fifty, you crumb, for the powder room.
1981		J. Wambaugh Glitter Dome (1982) 205: She’s the seventeen-year-old daughter of a nickeldime bookie owns a restaurant on Sunset.
1986		L. Heinemann Paco’s Story (1987) 11: That trio and the woman played every nickel-and-dime base camp [...] south of the 17th Parallel.
1994		R.P. McNamara Times Square Hustler 55: We call them the nickel and dime club cause they be a lot of lonely old gay guys who are on welfare that come here and pick up guys.
2000		F.X. Toole Rope Burns 143: Nickel-dime gym bums looking to hustle a two-dollar loan.
2001		Source Aug. 98: He graduated from nickel-and-dime-sized crumbs to moving white bricks.
2003		C. Stella Charlie Opera 249: This is horseshit, nickel-and-dime horseshit.
2010		Codella and Bennett Alphaville (2011) 142: Small-time [...] nickel-and-dime crime complaints wasn’t for me.