Product Description

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 percent 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65658 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-19
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 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

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".

A whole new perspective of looking at Walmart
This book does not try to justify Walmart as good or evil. All this book does is provide the reader a whole new perspective of Walmart. I was amazed at how much I never knew (or never cared to find out) about Walmart inspite of shopping there almost 2-3 times a month. What I could grasp out of this book is that Walmart does what it has to in order to survive in today's cut-throat competetive world. And Walmart is able to do that because of its consumers (that would be us). Although I do not approve of all WM's practices, I'd still buy there. Why? Because I can save a few bucks! The one thing mentioned in this book I liked most is when the author mentioned something like this... Is it okay if some of us loose there jobs so that toothpaste and underwear and deodorant become cheaper for all of us? The answer is a resounding YES... As much as I'd like to disagree with the above statement, I can not. And I think most of you wouldn't care also as long as the person loosing the job is not your family member or neighbor. This book is criticising Walmart's practices as much as it is criticising all of us consumers. I thouroughly enjoyed this book and actually learned a lot from it. Highly recommened!

mind-boggling facts and figures
The overall theme of this book is that for every Wal-Mart action there is both a positive and negative impact for those involved. The first example of this(in the book)is that of underarm deodorant, in which Wal-Mart convinced suppliers to do away with the individual cardboard packaging, resulting in a saving of one nickel per deodorant bottle. This equates to a saving of $10 million (assuming the 200 million adults in America purchased a bottle of deodorant). Of this $10 million dollar saving, the `winners' were the customer, who got to keep half ($5 million), while the suppliers got to keep the other half. The nation has saved hundreds of millions of dollars since the disappearance of the deodorant cardboard box. The `losers' were the cardboard manufacturers who lost a lot of business due to the cancellations of these cardboard boxes. There are many more examples like this in the book.

Wal-Mart's buying power provides everyday savings to consumers on most lines of merchandise. The majority of the costs squeezed out of suppliers is passed on to the consumer and not to Wal-Mart's bottom line.

With all the negative press that Wal-Mart receives, there is no denying the global dominance of a company who would not be the size or success that it is, if not for the consumers, who vote with their wallets everyday in one of the 4000 plus facilities.

I found the material in this book to be well researched and informative with many mind-boggling facts and figures.