The Wal-Mart effect : how the world's most powerful company really works-- and how it's transforming the American economy

Wal-Mart isn't just the world's biggest company, it is probably the world's most written-about. But no book until this one has managed to penetrate its wall of silence or go beyond the usual polemics to analyze its actual effects on its customers, workers, and suppliers. Drawing on unprecedented interviews with former Wal-Mart executives and a wealth of staggering data (e.g., Americans spend $36 million an hour at Wal-Mart stores, and in 2004 its growth alone was bigger than the total revenue of 469 of the Fortune 500), The Wal-Mart Effect is an intimate look at a business that is dramatically reshaping our lives. From Publishers Weekly Fishman shops at Wal-Mart and has obvious affection for its price-cutting, hard-nosed ethos. He also understands that the story of Wal-Mart is really the story of the transformation of the American economy over the past 20 years. He's careful to present the consumer benefits of Wal-Mart's staggering growth and to place Wal-Mart in the larger context of globalization and the rise of mega-corporations. But he also presents the case against Wal-Mart in arresting detail, and his carefully balanced approach only makes the downside of Wal-Mart's market dominance more vivid. Through interviews with former Wal-Mart insiders and current suppliers, Fishman puts readers inside the company's penny-pinching mindset and shows how Wal-Mart's mania to reduce prices has driven suppliers into bankruptcy and sent factory jobs overseas. He surveys the research on Wal-Mart's effects on local retailers, details the environmental impact of its farm-raised salmon and exposes the abuse of workers in a supplier's Bangladesh factory. In Fishman's view, the "Wal-Mart effect" is double-edged: consumers benefit from lower prices, even if they don't shop at Wal-Mart, but Wal-Mart has the power of life and death over its suppliers. Wal-Mart, he suggests, is too big to be subject to market forces or traditional rules. In the end, Fishman sees Wal-Mart as neither good nor evil, but simply a fact of modern life that can barely be comprehended, let alone controlled. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The "Wal-Mart effect" has become a common phrase in the vocabulary of economists and includes a broad range of effects, such as forcing local competitors out of business, driving down wages, and keeping inflation low and productivity high. On a global scale, Wal-Mart's relentless commitment to "everyday low prices" has had a massive impact on the trend toward importing from countries like China and the resultant loss of manufacturing jobs here. Because of its strict policy on secrecy, surprisingly little is known about the inside workings of the largest corporation ever in the U.S and now the world. Although much has been written before on the legendary story of Sam Walton, Fishman finally takes us inside the carefully guarded workings of the "Wal-Mart ecosystem," where management surrender their lives and families, working 12 hours a day, six days a week, in a near-holy quest toward the never-ending goal of lower prices. He brings to light the serious repercussions that are occurring as consumers and suppliers have become locked in an addiction to massive sales of cheaper and cheaper goods. David Siegfried Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "Charles Fishman has penetrated Wal-Mart's wall of secrecy, gaining the first in-depth and truly revealing access to a host of former Wal-Mart executives as well as managers at leading brand companies that sell to Wal-Mart, and digging up the untold story of "the Wal-Mart effect." In this investigation, he takes us on a behind-the-scenes expedition deep inside the many worlds of Wal-Mart and uncovers the hidden nature, and remarkable extent, of the company's power." "The Wal-Mart Effect reveals the array of ways in which the company is reshaping the terms of business; the economies of our communities; the lives of factory workers, both in the United States and around the world; and even the entire U.S. economy. Taking us inside the Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters, onto the factory floors, and into the stores themselves in a way we've never shopped them before, Fishman has discovered how Wal-Mart brings prices down so dramatically and what the remarkable payoffs and high costs of those "everyday low prices" really are." "Is the company a good thing or a bad thing? Fishman shows that this question doesn't even begin to address what we need to know about Wal-Mart. Not only is Wal-Mart the most powerful company in the world, he says, but it has become so powerful that it reaches into executive suites and onto factory floors and sets the terms for the ways companies do their business, exacting enormous efficiencies but also shifting costs onto suppliers and forcing some to the brink of bankruptcy, and some beyond. The number-one employer in thirty-seven of the fifty states, Wal-Mart claims that it is a leading creator of new jobs, but Fishman's analysis shows that, in fact, most of the company's "new" jobs come at the expense of jobs at other retailers. So profound is this effect on local businesses when Wal-Mart moves into town that one study has shown that the company may actually cause poverty. And yet the best estimates indicate that Wal-Mart saved American consumers $30 billion in 2004, and expert analysis has shown that the company has significantly lowered the rate of inflation in the United States. No company is more reviled, and yet no company is also so revered."--Jacket