WAL-MART EFFECT

Wal-Mart Effect

Wal-Mart Effect

Wal-Mart, one of the world's largest economies (it accounts for a whopping 2% of U.S. gross domestic product, and in any given week, 100 million people - half the adult population in the United states - to shop at Wal-Mart!), has taken on the chin in recent years. John Dicker _United States of Wal-Mart_, Bill Quinn _How Wal-Mart is destroying America and World_, and the recent film "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," are examples of this trend. Each of these documents for low-wage Wal-Mart and benefits, take no prisoners competitiveness that business-bars-and-burn local and guts local main streets, and its willingess to buy goods from the sweat shop .

In his _Wal-Mart Effect_, Fishman does not deny the pernicious practices of Wal-Mart. But the most interesting feature of his book is his analysis of the culture that Wal-Mart has created in the United States. In short, Wal-Mart has enabled American consumers to expect and demand lower prices, and immediately suspect that any product that is priced higher than the equivalent of Wal-Mart must be a scam. The Wal-Mart ethos, in other words, has replaced traditional consumer concern with low cost high quality as the main criterion.

This replacement of quality with low price is troubling enough (think of the environmental effect of buying cheap junk that quickly ends up in a landfill). But Fishman goes to show that the new culture of low costs means that Wal-Mart should run continuously to meet customer demands that its practices have created. So Wal-Mart is becoming more and more off-shore sweat shop products to keep prices low, and the process is forcing more and more Americans wholesellers, who are already struggling to survive, to close its U.S. operations . UU. and move overseas where labor and production costs are lower.

I came to this book in search of solid information from inside the company - after all, the cover boasts that the author "penetrated Wal-Mart wall of secrecy." Well, I regret to report that the author has done such a thing. Instead, what the reader gets is a rehash of something that has already been written (if he in many cases), with extended (and repetitive) stories to critics both outside and some partners (suppliers) company in the stories are so long as to feel like filler. But he did not find any honest visionaries or even hesitate to question within the company to offer the perspective that I expected to find. On the other hand (and much worse), there are huge gaps that the author is entirely alien or may even have chosen to ignore.

Practices of Wal-Mart business are well known: promises "everyday low prices" and convenience as their competitive advantage as general merchant, the company seeks tirelessly cost-efficient way to squeeze suppliers, which offer relatively low wages and little health care and development an unprecedented logistical operation that literally extends the world with factories in China, etc. That is about it and explains the phenomenal expansion of the company ...