The goliath that reshaped America

The world's largest firm by sales (although it will yield the title to ExxonMobil this year, owing to oil prices), Wal-Mart invites debate like no other company. The No. 1 employer in perhaps 24 states, it is a steamroller of mom-and-pop shops, a union-defying exploiter of the "associates" it treats as serfs. Or, it is a shrewd, hardball-playing handler of its suppliers, a bargain-stacked bazaar for the hard-pressed. It all depends on whom you ask.

But one point is not disputed: Wal-Mart is an unrelenting shifter of the retail - and social - landscape.

As such it has been examined from both poles. The third edition of Texas newspaperman Bill Quinn's 1998 book "How Wal-Mart is Destroying America (and the World)" rolled out in 2005. So did "The Wal-Mart Way," by senior Wal-Mart executive Don Soderquist, finally presenting the Arkansas-based retailer's own perspective and principles.

Now come others, wisely working the middle ground. A dozen essayists parse the meaning of the late Sam Walton's enigmatic store in Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism, edited by labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein. But the breezier read, by far, comes from Charles Fishman, a senior editor at Fast Company.

The Wal-Mart Effect saunters through the influential economic "ecosystem" that the discount chain represents with clarity, compelling nuance, and refreshing objectivity.

Swaths of well-placed narrative - some of it first-person - put the reader in the aisles, hunting down light bulbs, taking in the sight of 12-lb. jars of whole pickles, sorting through the mixed emotions that a trip to Wal-Mart can evoke.

Fishman describes, for example, the remarkable efficiency of his local Wal-Mart (he goes to buy, never to "shop") in fully renovating without closing.

Fishman's main point: Wal-Mart is a force that requires new thinking about management. He comes around to explaining Wal-Mart's effect on US inflation (it holds it down). He shows the somewhat illusory nature of its job-creation numbers. And he dutifully follows the painful labor chain - which is by no means exclusive to Wal-Mart - back to the workers (most often foreign workers) who pay for the "dark bargains of the global economy."

Fishman also explains how Wal-Mart appeals to pennypinchers but leaves many customers feeling conflicted, not cheered in the way that, say, a Southwest Airlines experience might leave them.

But first come the passages that define Wal-Mart's scale. However many superlatives you have heard applied to the company, you will still be astonished.

Think Target seems ubiquitous? Wal-Mart, which now employs 1.6 million people, sells more by St. Patrick's Day than Target does all year.

Wal-Mart has crashed the party even in industries that seemed invulnerable.

"In little more than a decade, from a standing start, Wal-Mart mastered the US grocery business and remade what turned out to be a complacent industry in its wake," Fishman writes. "Today Wal-Mart sells more groceries than any company not just in the United States but in the world...."

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