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The Wal-Mart Effect: How the
World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the
American Economy by Charles Fishman is getting rave reviews. Penguin Press, 304 pages. The author is a senior editor at Fast
Company. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award,
the highest award in business journalism, and he had been a finalist for the
Loeb in 3 of the last 4 years. In 2004 his story about Wal-Mart was given the
New York Press Club's award for the best magazine story about business. He has
appeared regularly on NPR, CNN, and Fox News. I linked to Powell’s City of Books below not just because it’s a
Portland, Oregon institution, but because they post a wider range of reviews
than Amazon does. Having said that, I’ll lead with this one also from a local
source: “From interviews with former Wal-Mart executives, those who do business
with the retail giant, and an economist who compiled the scarce data available,
a business journalist who wrote an award- winning story on the company examines
issues behind the reactions that it evokes. Regarding it as a transformative
company (like U.S. Steel was in the 19th century), Fishman
argues that the issues raised by Wal-Mart's supporters and detractors should be
the subject of national debate: e.g., business
freedom vs. impact on local community interests, inexpensive prices vs. living
wage jobs.” Annotation
©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Publisher’s Comments An award-winning journalist breaks through the wall of secrecy to
reveal the many astonishing ways Wal-Mart's power affects our lives and reaches
all around the world. The Wal-Mart Effect:
The overwhelming impact of the world's largest company--due to its relentless
pursuit of low prices--on retailers and manufacturers, wages and jobs, the culture of shopping, the shape of
our communities, and the environment; a global force of unprecedented nature. Wal-Mart is not only the world's
largest company; it is also the largest company in the history of the world.
Americans spend $26
million every hour at Wal-Mart, twenty-four hours of every
day, every day of the year. Is the company a good thing or a bad thing? On the
one hand, market guru Warren Buffett estimates that the company's low prices
save American consumers $10 billion a year. On the other, the behemoth is the
#1 employer in thirty-seven of the fifty states yet has never let a union in
the door. Though 70% of
Americans now live within a fifteen-minute drive of a Wal-Mart store, we have
not even begun to understand the true power of the company and the many ways it
is shaping American life. We know about the lawsuits and the labor protests,
but what we don't know is how profoundly the "Wal-Mart effect" is
shaping our lives. Fast
Company
senior editor Fishman, whose revelatory cover story on Wal-Mart generated the
strongest reader response in the history of the magazine, takes us on an
unprecedented behind-the-scenes investigative expedition deep inside the many
worlds of Wal-Mart. He reveals the radical ways in which the company is
transforming America's economy, our workforce, our communities, and our
environment. Fishman penetrated the secrecy of Wal-Mart headquarters, interviewing twenty-five high-level
ex-executives;
he journeyed into the world of a host of Wal-Mart's suppliers to uncover how
the company strong-arms even the most established brands; and journeyed to the
ports and factories, the fields and forests where Wal-Mart's power is warping
the very structure of the world's market for goods. Wal-Mart is not just a retailer anymore,
Fishman argues. It has become a kind of
economic ecosystem,
and anyone who wants to understand the forces shaping our world today must
understand the company's hidden reach. http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=28666&cgi=product&isbn=1594200769&campaign=americanprospect |
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