The Retail Revolution
How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The definitive account of how a small Ozarks company upended the world of business and what that change means
Wal-Mart, the world's largest company, roared out of the rural South to change the way business is done. Deploying computer-age technology, Reagan-era politics, and Protestant evangelism, Sam Walton's firm became a byword for cheap goods and low-paid workers, famed for the ruthless efficiency of its global network of stores and factories. But the revolution has gone further: Sam's protégés have created a new economic order which puts thousands of manufacturers, indeed whole regions, in thrall to a retail royalty. Like the Pennsylvania Railroad and General Motors in their heyday, Wal-Mart sets the commercial model for a huge swath of the global economy.
In this lively, probing investigation, historian Nelson Lichtenstein deepens and expands our knowledge of the merchandising giant. He shows that Wal-Mart's rise was closely linked to the cultural and religious values of Bible Belt America as well as to the imperial politics, deregulatory economics, and laissez-faire globalization of Ronald Reagan and his heirs. He explains how the company's success has transformed American politics, and he anticipates a day of reckoning, when challenges to the Wal-Mart way, at home and abroad, are likely to change the far-flung empire.
Insightful, original, and steeped in the culture of retail life, The Retail Revolution draws on first hand reporting from coastal China to rural Arkansas to give a fresh and necessary understanding of the phenomenon that has transformed international commerce.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lichtenstein (Walter Reuther) offers a comprehensive if dry discussion of Wal-Mart the world's largest private sector employer and its place in the changing global economy. The author covers the company's rise from a group of tiny rural Arkansas stores to an enormous international entity, plagued by equally enormous problems: accusations of widespread sexual and racial discrimination, a history of dodging minimum wage law and unemployment claims, union-busting, destruction of smaller companies, chronic employee theft and bad publicity following the discovery of goods produced by child laborers. Though Lichtenstein speaks with bemused awe of Wal-Mart's omnipresence in commerce and culture, advanced logistics system and evangelical background, the message is that Wal-Mart whose eerie motto "Our long-term strategy is to be where we're not" has gotten too large and unwieldy to support its own weight. While it serves well as a primer on the company many Americans love to hate, the distant tone and ponderous detail will not help this book stand out from the rank and file of Wal-Mart expos s.