The goliath that reshaped America

Some of what the goliath has wrought is undeniably good. In the early 1990s, when it ditched the practice of boxing deodorant containers in the interest of thrift, the industry followed suit, saving an incalculable amount of cardboard.

Today, when Wal-Mart negotiates with suppliers, it tends to get its way. The firm has an obsession, Fishman reports, "almost a corporate fetish" with the kind of cost- and price-cutting that have made Wal-Mart a consumer magnet.

Fishman quotes a former president of Tropicana on dealing with the Wal-Mart muscle. "They won't relent. They'd just as soon do business without Tropicana, and keep faith with their customers."

So are little guys necessarily ground up in Wal-Mart's maw? No. Fishman walks readers through the case of a father-daughter firm from Minnesota whose microwaveable bacon-cooking device sees profitable distribution through the store while keeping their manufacturing local.

But Fishman is no apologist. He gives the dark-siders their due. "What looks like missionary zeal when you're a quirky regional retailer comes across much differently when you're the most powerful company, and the largest employer, in the world," he writes.

In a chapter called "the Squeeze," Fishman uses the story of those gallon jars of pickles to show how Wal-Mart effectively bent the principles of the free-market economy to get from supplier Vlasic what it needed, at Vlasic's expense.

Wal-Mart, Fishman explains, does not concern itself with being genial. Dangling the prospect of volume sales, it essentially gets companies hooked.

Some firms break away, and talk. Fishman details the successful fight of Snapper, the lawnmower company. Given the scale on which it works, Snapper saw in its Wal-Mart partnership a future of off-shore manufacturing and a push to go down-market. It chose to resist the lure.

"[Wal-Mart] not only has no rivals, it often seems impervious to challenge, let alone accountability," writes Fishman. "Many of the most basic, and most urgent, questions about Wal-Mart, those at the core of the public debate, are unanswered. Wal-Mart's own forty-year history of absolute secrecy, including forbidding its suppliers to talk about Wal-Mart, has only deepened the mystery of Wal-Mart's impact."

It's not that Wal-Mart is greedy or disingenuous, Fishman maintains: "How could a company so ... unpretentious, so frugal, a company so driven, so tireless, so determined to drive a hard bargain be bad?"

Wal-mart is perhaps a perfect fit for the culture that spawned it - one that simultaneously values frugality and loves to consume.

But America now confronts a creation that grew from a simple idea to a social test. "What changes is the scale," writes Fishman, "what changes is the intangible - the power, the impact that comes with scale."

• Clay Collins is a Monitor staff writer.

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