TOP DRAWER BOOK REVIEW
by
HL Carpenter

 

The Wal-Mart Effect
by Charles Fishman
ISBN 1-59420-076-9
294 pages; hardcover; $25.95
The Penguin Press, New York, 2006

 

What type of Wal-Mart shopper are you? Champion, Enthusiast, Conflicted or Rejecter? Don’t rush to answer, because it doesn’t really matter. Whatever attitudinal slot you fit yourself into, it’s likely you spend a fair amount of money there.

According to a survey conducted in Oklahoma City during 2003, 93% of that city’s residents shopped at Wal-Mart, and even those who called themselves ‘rejecters’ – people who dislike the company – spent approximately $450 there over the course of a year.

Want more numbers? The Wal-Mart Effect has enough of them to fill a supercenter. For instance, approximately 90% of Americans live within 15 miles of one of the company’s 3,811 U.S. stores and 7.2 billion people shop at a Wal-Mart each year.

The bottom line is Wal-Mart is a huge company that has a huge impact on local, national and global economies. You probably already knew that.

What author and journalist Charles Fishman wants you to think about is whether all that power in the hands of one company is a good thing. How does Wal-Mart manage to keep prices so low – and what are the implications for suppliers, competing retailers, consumer behavior and foreign workers? Do we really have a market economy when one player controls so much of the market?

Mr. Fishman says some of those questions are unanswerable, partly because Wal-Mart is so large it’s unique and partly because the company is rather parsimonious with data. But he believes The Wal-Mart Effect is real. You can judge for yourself how accurate he is the next time you stop at your local store.

 

Review originally published July 2006.