The United States of Wal-Mart: John Dicker
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Although it’s getting too big to be a microcosm, Wal-Mart is a fair representation of many of the most troubling aspects of the American economy, according to this lively and insightful profile of the big-box retail leviathan. Former Colorado Springs Independent staff writer Dicker admirably sums up the conventional complaints against Wal-Mart, detailing poverty-level wages, skimpy benefits, scorched-earth antiunion policies, shuttered smalltown Main Streets, suburban sprawl abetment and rampant outsourcing. Behind the facade of “corn-pone populism” fostered by folksy but steely founder Sam Walton, Dicker asserts, Wal-Mart has become a “global despot.” Dicker’s analysis is unsparing but balanced. He sympathizes (and sometimes strategizes) with Wal-Mart opponents, but also chides them for ignoring the appeal of the company’s cheap, convenient offerings to cash-strapped customers and underserved communities. And Wal-Mart’s sins, he argues, are America’s; the company merely caters to the national religion of consumer entitlement that assumes shoppers have no interests in common with workers and puts low prices ahead of any social consequences. Aside from some pointless and tiresome lapses into prison-chic posturing (”[w]e’re all Wal-Mart’s bitches”), Dicker conveys a wealth of information in a lucid and light-handed style. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The New York Times Book Review, July 17, 2005
a nuanced and bracing portrait of the largest retailer in the world.
See all Editorial Reviews
See all Editorial Reviews&order
What’s incredibly worrisome is the might that Walmart exerts over other major companies. The Huffington Post just published an article yesterday about how Haines, the underwear company, is now forced to outsource jobs simply so that they can be more competitive in their prices that they offer to Walmart.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:45 pm