The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy
by Charles Fishman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charles FishmanEdition: Paperback
Published: 2006-12-26
ISBN: 0143038788
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy
Book Review: A highly fascinating book
Summary: 5 Stars
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".
Summary of 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.Company Profiles Books
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