The Retail Revolution The Retail Revolution

The Retail Revolution

How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business

    • 3.0 • 1 Rating
    • $11.99
    • $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.

GENRE
Politics & Current Events
RELEASED
2009
July 21
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
320
Pages
PUBLISHER
Henry Holt and Co.
SELLER
Macmillan
SIZE
1.3
MB

More Books by Nelson Lichtenstein

State of the Union State of the Union
2013
A Fabulous Failure A Fabulous Failure
2023
Capitalism Contested Capitalism Contested
2020
Labor’s Partisans Labor’s Partisans
2025
Beyond the New Deal Order Beyond the New Deal Order
2019
The Right and Labor in America The Right and Labor in America
2016