Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16320 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

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 AudioFile
Do you shop at Wal-Mart, or avoid it like the plague? THE WAL-MART EFFECT may change your shopping habits, and it most certainly will affect your perception of economics and business practice today. Charles Fishman takes a hard look at supply, demand, and pricing, as well as business practice as developed by Sam Walton, and now his children. Alan Sklar brings his narrating experience in reading nonfiction to bear on this "tell all" book. Sklar approaches each revelation with fresh enthusiasm, even when Fishman's text is repetitive. Delving into Wal-Mart's secrets will change your perception of marketing and business forever. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
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

Customer Reviews

Nothing new or insightful
Fishman spends the first 30 pages hinting that Wal-mart forced its suppliers out of business by demanding lower prices. This may sound horrifying to you, but demanding lower costs is industry standard for retailers. If you owned a store, would you voluntarily offer your supplier more money?

If your knowledge of Wal-mart and retailing is limited to what you've heard on the 6 o'clock news, this book gives you a peek into that world. But it falls far short of it's claims to expose "how the world's most powerful company really works". The author openly admits that there is almost no information on Wal-mart, so what he has is anecdotal and fragmented and not particularly convincing.

Unfortunately, Fishman is unable to break out of the standard Wal-mart bashing arguments around "low wages" (which are not unreasonably low at ~$10/hr), "forcing local business to close" (any large, well-run retailer could have caused it), and "cheap goods made in deplorable conditions" (unfortunately, some factory owners don't have the same morals as we do. Paying more won't for something won't result in better standards, just more money for the owner).

Verdict: Borrow at your library.

Is Walmart Good or Bad? Answer: It's both!!
This is a very good book, well-researched and well-reported, about a subject that affects us all, the biggest company in history, Walmart.

Is Walmart good or bad? The answer according to Charles Fishman is: "Yes, it is both". I just didn't realize how big Walmart is and how much it does affect us.

Walmart is a monster player in the economy, the largest company in history, and nobody outside of Walmart knows much about it. It is committed to low prices like a missionary is committed to the Word of God, but is unfortunately short on a sense of repentance for its shortcomings and a little short on the joy that a true missionary should ideally have. It might however finally be coming around if its generous response to Katrina is any indication.

I read this book, believe it or not, to learn a little more about the economy through the prism of Walmart. Sometimes it is easier to me to learn something indirectly: by learning how Walmart functions and interacts with the economy is to learn about the economy itself. I would also like to know how Walmart creates so much economic weather. I think I've only been in a Walmart once and had the impression it was way too big and too far to walk for everyday shopping. Also, it seems to get a lot of press about how it could be more employee-aware and environmentally correct. Charles Fishman seems to think they finally get this message and is cautiously optimistic about their correcting some things.

One of the things I learned about the economy is how interconnected it is with everything around us. For Walmart, it involves customers, suppliers, the government, other countries, and, of course, the economy itself. This book, to its credit, is not short on statistical information, especially since studying the impact of Walmart requires a lot of digging; the company is simply NOT forthcoming.

I think I was most impressed by the scale of all things Walmart and the great veil of secrecy that surrounds it. The world doesn't understand it and it doesn't really understand why the world can have any problem with low prices. But the good news is that it is apparently trying to understand and do better. We can all learn from that.

A highly fascinating book
If you see this book on the bookshelf, and don't know much about Wal-Mart (as is the case with me), you probably couldn't imagine just how far-reaching this "Wal-Mart effect" is in the US and other countries. From its role at the core of the US economy, to its effect on the inflation rate, to both the lifeline and downfall it is for tens of thousands of suppliers at the same time, to dictating changes in consumer habits, to its sheer scale, to the way it completely reshuffles the job market wherever it opens store, to the way national consumer research is distorted by their policy of secrecy, to the remarkable link between poverty and Wal-Mart's presence found by a peer-reviewed study that controlled for all other causes of poverty, make for eye-opening and gripping reading across the board. Also note that that was by no means an exhaustive list.

The book makes no exceptions: sometimes the facts and anecdotes cast the company in a positive light, sometimes an inevitably negative one. Adding insult to injury, for example, the book highlights Wal-Mart's role as the primary driving force in the environmental iniquity that is Chilean salmon farms, responsible for dumping vast quantities of effluents containing chemicals and feces into its waters - creating dead zones, as well as the fiasco that is the uncovering of incredibly inhumane working conditions in Bangladeshi factories and elsewhere.

Fortunately, Wal-Mart's purchasing power probably (arguably) gives them the most leverage in the world for forcing the adoption of more environmentally sound policies (as a corporation), but how they will exercise this power is unclear (they are in talks with various environmental groups, and have made some preliminary promises at the time of writing, but accountability debates will probably still debilitate the outcome)

A rabid pressure for lower prices (at the cost of many well-meaning US suppliers and manufacturers, unfortunately) are among the things that enabled Wal-Mart to rise to the top so swiftly - they've surpassed GM, IBM, GE, Ford, ExxonMobil in just 9 years time to become the biggest company in the United States and on Earth, with $387.69 billion in revenue (2007), and that from their humble beginnings in Bentonville, Arkansas (the town where their main operations still reside to this day).

As an aside, I might add something about the author. I've only started reading business books, but Charles Fishman hit the bulls-eye with the kind of conversational style I like. Having recently read works by authors Paul Hawken (an excellent author albeit using a high level of jargon and a less conversational style) and Thomas Friedman (too sloppy - even irksome at times, if you will), Fishman achieves a very good balance that makes reading his work a great pleasure.

As for his overall stance in this book, it is apparent that he didn't purposely write it either to praise or criticize Wal-Mart, and he demonstrates this in a comment toward the end: "You could easily write a book about the ways in which Wal-Mart is good, and a book about the ways in which Wal-Mart is bad. It's the wrong question. It's like asking if the car is good for America".