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How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy
Penguin
January 2006
304 pages
ISBN: 1594200769
Hardcover
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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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