The Wal-Mart Effect

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. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

January 30, 2006
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.