“The Wal-mart effect”

Written by: William S. Kowinski

Business journalist Charles Fishman begins his book with a disarming story of how Wal-Mart produced an environmental benefit when the company decided that paperboard boxes around cans of deodorant were unnecessary. So they disappeared -- not only from Wal-Mart but from everywhere -- thereby saving many trees. But the reason Wal-Mart did this, and the reason everyone else followed, he argues, are also the key factors in a new kind and extent of destruction.
These factors cause the various manifestations of the Wal-Mart effect, which is the subject of Fishman's book. The first factor is the company's single operating principle, administered absolutely, without exception: always low prices. It is not only Wal-Mart's slogan but also its one commandment, its ultimate morality, trumping all other considerations.
The second factor is Wal-Mart's unprecedented size. "For most of this decade, Wal-Mart has been both the largest company in the world, and the largest company in the history of the world," Fishman writes. It still would be in 2006 except that the doubling of oil prices places Exxon-Mobil in the top spot. But Wal-Mart is still America's largest private employer -- as well as the world's. And its stated goal is to be twice its current size by 2010.
Ninety percent of Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart, and 93 percent of U.S. households shop at one at least once a year. Fishman concludes: "Wal-Mart reshapes the economic life of the towns and cities where it opens stores; it also reshapes the economic life of the United States -- a single company that steadily, silently, purposefully moves the largest economy in history."
It all results from the combination of "always low prices" and Wal-Mart's unprecedented size and scale (and, as Fishman points out, "the power, the impact that comes with