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The Wal-Mart Effect : How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy (精装)
by Charles Fishman
| Category:
Corporate history, Corporate success, Entrepreneurship, Business |
| Market price: ¥ 288.00
MSL price:
¥ 258.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An excellent study of how Wal-Mart has affected America and the World. |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 14 items |
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USA Today (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
The Wal-Mart Effect is an interesting look at how big corporations affect our planet in positive and negative ways. |
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Baltimore Sun (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
...a fascinating dissection of the most controversial corporation in America today. |
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The Christian Science Monitor (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
The Wal-Mart Effect saunters through the influential economic ‘ecosystem’ that the discount chain represents with clarity, compelling nuance, and refreshing objectivity. |
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The Washington Post (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
A must-read if one is even to begin understanding the global dominance of Wal-Mart. |
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David Siegfried (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
The "Wal-Mart effect" has become a common phrase in the vocabulary of economists and includes a broad range of effects, such as forcing local competitors out of business, driving down wages, and keeping inflation low and productivity high. On a global scale, Wal-Mart's relentless commitment to "everyday low prices" has had a massive impact on the trend toward importing from countries like China and the resultant loss of manufacturing jobs here. Because of its strict policy on secrecy, surprisingly little is known about the inside workings of the largest corporation ever in the U.S and now the world. Although much has been written before on the legendary story of Sam Walton, Fishman finally takes us inside the carefully guarded workings of the "Wal-Mart ecosystem," where management surrender their lives and families, working 12 hours a day, six days a week, in a near-holy quest toward the never-ending goal of lower prices. He brings to light the serious repercussions that are occurring as consumers and suppliers have become locked in an addiction to massive sales of cheaper and cheaper goods. |
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Joel Arnold (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
This is an excellent, even mesmerizing, read. Charles Fishman takes an unbiased look at Wal-Mart and diligently searches for the facts. He gathers the statistics together with the stories of companies like Vlassic, Makin Bacon, Snapper lawn mowers, DMC thread, Ridlen glue and L.R. Nelson sprinklers. He shows the effect that Wal-Mart has on the customer, the factories, the companies and the world. So engrossing, my wife and I actually quarreled at night over who got to read it. We had some great discussions afterward about what we could and should do as consumers. This book will make you think.
There are several jaw-dropping facts in this book that I did not want to forget. So below are just a handful of these discoveries, some almost stranger than fiction. Read the book and you'll find much more and see how they are all linked together.
Wal-Mart has 1,906 Supercenters, 1,000 more than it did 5 years ago.
A typical Wal-Mart Supercenter offers 120,000 different items for sale.
A New York Times story in February 1986 was headlined "Kmart Closing the Sears Gap." The story asked, "Will the Kmart Corporation edge out Sears, Roebuck and Company before the 1980s end and become the nation's largest general merchandise retailer?" The story did not mention Wal-Mart. By the end of 1990, Wal-Mart was bigger than Kmart. Two years later Wal-Mart passed Sears. By the end of 1994, Wal-Mart was bigger than the two combined.
53 percent of the U.S. population lives within five miles of a Wal-Mart; 90 percent live within fifteen miles; 97 percent live within 20 miles.
15 years ago, there were no Wal-Marts in Mexico. They are now the largest corporate employer, the largest retailer and the largest grocer in the country.
During the last seven years, a remarkable milestone has passed all but unnoticed: In 2003, for the first time in modern U.S. history, the number of Americans working in retail (14.9 million) was greater than the number of Americans working in factories (14.5 million). We have more people working in stores than we do making the merchandise to put in them.
Huffy Bikes once gave four of their designs to competitors to help them meet an order they had with Wal-Mart. Today, 95 percent of the bikes sold in the USA are imported from China.
The senior vice president for public affairs for Black and Decker said, "The cost structure of operating manufacturing plants in the United States is just enormously out of sync with what people want to pay. Dramatically."
65 percent of the farmed salmon sold in the U.S. comes from Chile. 12 years ago, Chile had no salmon.
A sixteen year-old sewing operator at a factory in Bangladesh describes her experiences of working for a supplier to Wal-Mart. She earned 13 cents an hour, fourteen hours of work a day, $26.98 a month. If she didn't sew to the mandated pace, pockets onto 120 pants per hour, a supervisor would slap her across the face with the pants she was sewing. "This happens often. They hit you hard. It is no joke." At this wage, if she were to work there for 50 years, her total wages would have been $16,200. Wal-Mart 's profit in 2004 was $19,597 a minute.
Wal-Mart does inspections of its foreign supplier factories. But of the 12,500 inspections in 2004, only 8 percent were surprise visits. So about 11,500 were scheduled in advance. Still, 9,900 of the inspections resulted in violations serious enough to either suspend a factory or put it on notice. Even if you presume that the 9,900 number includes every single surprise inspection, that still means that 8,900 factories revealed serious violations when they knew that Wal-Mart inspectors were coming. What is life like at these factories on a typical day?
The Gap has a ninety person factory standards team. In 2004, Wal-Mart increased their team from 114 to 202. Still, if you compare the annual sales of Gap to Wal-Mart - $16.3 billion to $288 billion - Wal-Mart should have about 900 inspectors, not 200.
The average family is carrying $14,400 in credit card debt. The family savings rate is below 1 percent.
In Georgia, 10,261 children enrolled in the state's insurance program for poor children had a parent who worked at Wal-Mart. The next highest employer was a super market that had 734 children on the list. In Tennessee, 9,617 Wal-Mart employees were on the state's health insurance program for low-income people.
The five biggest public companies in the U.S. account for 9 percent of the economy. The top twenty account for 20 percent of the economy. In 1994, you would have had to add up the top 30 companies to get 20 percent of the economy. Fifty years ago, not even the sales of the top 60 companies equaled 20 percent.
"It's time to do two things: To acknowledge in public policy terms that there is a difference between a $10 million corporation, a $100 million corporation, and a $100 billion corporation. We need to acknowledge that scale matters. And we need to start a fresh process of understanding by insisting on a level of information from megacorporations that they will vigorously resist providing." |
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Wendy Schroeder (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
At first, I thought Mr. Fishman might be a little too much on Wal-mart's side but then decided he is trying his best to be neutral and have a readable book. After all, how often do the average person reads a book about business?
He talks about how addictive Wal-mart is not just for consumers but even for the people working for Wal-mart. You save a little here, a little there and it's all one stop. And Americans love a bargain. It's ingrained in our psyche. Starting with the pioneers and then the "Great Depression". My dad, who lived though it during his young adult years would have loved Wal-mart. I myself still feel uneasy when I pay full price for stuff since my dad put so much emphasis on getting a good deal or going without.
Manufactures want to supply Wal-mart. But once they start to become a supplier, Wal-mart demands, not asks, demands lower prices from them. And lots of manufactures either were put out of business or forced to have their stuff made overseas and made with lesser quality material.
The people over in China or poor countries work under conditions that is not legally allowed in the USA. One woman in Bangladesh filed a lawsuit with other workers (in California) because she would be hit in the face repeatedly for not getting out enough pants per hour. And her pay was 13 cents an hour! People are wearing pants that someone got beat with and are clueless about it. That makes me sick to my stomach. There is too much information regarding this for me to put into this entry. It's worth reading.
We are so obsessed with "bargains" in the country that we are shopping ourselves out of jobs. My son told me that only 20 percent of jobs in America are manufacturing jobs. We are becoming a service economy.
There is so much I could write about that I learned but I really would like the socially responsible to read this book. I liked it because Mr. Fishman does tell both sides and what could happen in the future or what we could choose. This is worth $25 for people who are activists and want to have this information on hand or worth checking out of the library if you just want more information on a store that effects everyone whether you shop there or not. |
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Mike Henson (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
If you've more than skimmed a newspaper article on Wal-Mart, you probably have a general idea of what this book is going to say. Wal-mart has made some management mistakes. They've pressured suppliers into lower prices, often lowering the quality of merchandise (and lowering the quality of labor practices and/or impeding outsourcing). They offer damn low prices for goods, so low that Wal-mart may have a measurable impact on keeping inflation lower. He doesn't add so much to the knowledge of the issue as make it very digestible as a quick read and give the Wal-mart story life. He has a good mix of individual case studies and academic sources to display evidence of his arguments.
But in the end, this book is suffering from a few issues. For one, this book is too long for the amount of ideas it contains. It feels the author added a lot of needless fluff to add pages. Second, near the end of the book, the author adds highly opinionated essays that are unnecessary, not particularly thought provoking (in my opinion), and detract from any objectivity this book may be providing. He's at his strongest when he's telling stories, not editorializing.
This is a good book, but you may want to skim a few parts and skip the last chapter or two.
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S. Chaney (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Charles Fishman, a journalist, has written a book on the Wal-Mart phenomenon. He gets some of his descriptions just right, such as those of its explosive growth, global reach, and relentless quest for efficiency.
Not being a businessman, I feel that he neglected to mention some salient points without which you can't understand Wal-Mart. One of them is that most other retailers belonged to a very diffuse group of stockholders, and were run by unionized management by committees whose main preoccupation was mutual backscratching. The general idea wasn't to do as good a job as possible, but rather to get the job done and not rock the boat. In my opinion the main reason that Wal-Mart is such a success, is because Sam Walton was the boss where the buck stopped, adult supervision. Any company with a vastly superior management structure will vastly outperform its badly managed peers.
Sam Walton's other ingenious insight was not to purchase IT that was just "good enough" but rather to invest in the best possible IT. In the short-term this cut into profits - something management committees abhorred - but the long term benefits have proven to be spectacular. Some of the Wal-Mart 's problems and pitfalls, which he describes, such as low wages and lax environmental regulation overseas, are very real, but, when you think about it, a matter of Wal-Mart taking full advantage of the laws of the lands. If the laws are faulty, this is something that legislators must resolve, a process that has already begun.
I wished Fishman would have put some thought into Wal-Mart 's future. John Rockefeller built himself a similar empire in oil, and fought the government's desire to split up his empire up tooth and nail, all the way to the US Supreme Court. When he was forced to split up his various companies and let them to compete with each other, the value of his empire skyrocketed; the whole was worth much less than the sum of the parts. In fact, wags joked that the Supreme Court was the best friend Rockefeller ever had. Perhaps one day, Wal-Mart will also unleash the massive hidden value that is trapped in its integrated structure.
All in all this book does a good job of describing the conundrums Wal-Mart raises that catch the fancy of the chattering classes, but it is neither the work of an economist or seasoned businessman, and this is evident. |
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Mark Luksic (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Wal-Mart's "low prices every day" policy is good for shoppers... or is it? How can companies continue to lower their prices and cut their margins while maintaing profitable operations and jobs for their employees? They can't. Companies that manufacture products that Wal-Mart sells are at the mercy of Wal-Mart's incessant pressure to lower their prices. Under the guise of keeping prices low for consumers (and remaining the lowest price retail option), Wal-Mart's demands for companies to continually lower their prices leaves them with few choices; either lower their price at or below the cost of production or discontinue its relationship with Wal-Mart. If companies choose option B (and there are some who decided that this was the only option for its business to survive) they have to find a way to make up for the lost business that Wal-Mart represented - as much as 25% to 40% for some larger companies and for smaller businesses - as much as 90%!
Yes, the US is a Capitalist society and for several decades, a policy of "laissez-faire" for a free market economy has enabled companies like Wal-Mart to grow and for participants in the free market to improve their well being. Economies of scale have enabled Wal-Mart to keep their prices low, which ostensibly translates into billions of discretionary dollars that consumers have been able to put to use for purchasing other goods and services. You could argue on this notion alone that Wal-Mart helps the economy. But I'd argue that this is but a facade to the greater issue that this effect has on our economy. It is this same 'economies of scale' that is also forcing the suppliers to Wal-Mart to outsource their production to developing nations (which ultimately hurts our GDP and the consumer after their jobs are lost and their ability to spend on goods and services at Wal-Mart or elsewhere, is diminished).
I fear that what's happening to Wal-Mart, (negative press about low wages, hiring immigrants to clean stores, lousy healthcare for part-time and full time employees, women suing WMT for discrimination, etc.) is a necessary but desperate attempt by many constituents to unveil the adverse affect that Wal-Mart has on the economy. Until an economist can prove how Wal-Mart hurts the economy and enlist the media to communicate his/her findings, and then convince the government to force the company to take actions to be less damaging to its constituents, including the people who shop there, Wal-Mart will continue to be the bully that will stop at nothing to sustain it's market share.
Read the book. You may not agree with my conclusion, but the book is well written and it will compel you to think about the Wal-Mart Effect, and how it impacts you and the economy. |
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