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How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy
Warner
January 2007
On Sale: December 26, 2006
336 pages ISBN: 0143038788 EAN: 9780143038788 Trade Size
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Non-Fiction
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.
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