Jon Wiener: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business
[Wiener teaches American history at UC Irvine and is a contributing editor to the Nation.]
The Retail Revolution
How Wal-Mart Created a
Brave New World of Business
Nelson Lichtenstein
Metropolitan Books: 312 pp., $25
Bentonville, Ark., may be unknown to most Americans, but it is the center of the world for some 750 corporations that manufacture consumer goods -- because Bentonville is the legendary home office of Wal-Mart, and those corporations want to sell their products to the world's largest retailer. It's also the largest private employer in the nation, operator of 4,200 stores.
Bentonville is a key to understanding the success of Wal-Mart, historian Nelson Lichtenstein argues in his terrific book, "The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business." Legendary founder Sam Walton didn't start in Bentonville, in the Ozarks in northwestern Arkansas. The first store he ran in the late 1940s was in Newport, Ark., in the Black Belt along the Mississippi where chain stores like Woolworth's soon became the target of sit-ins and business boycotts organized by the nascent civil rights movement.
But when Walton lost his lease on his first store in 1950 in the Delta he decided to relocate to the Ozarks, far from the social conflicts of the midcentury South. He was able to develop his business in a remote, isolated area. "The Ozarks were not just rural and poor," Lichtenstein writes. "They have long been uniquely homogeneous, among the most exclusively white regions in the nation."
One of Lichtenstein's most original contributions is his argument that Wal-Mart created its own corporate subculture rooted in this region. Sam Walton said Wal-Mart workers were "a family," and Lichtenstein writes that the company would create "a self-contained corporate culture, an ideology of family, faith, and folk communalism that to this day co-exists in a strange harmony with a Dickensian world of low wages, job insecurity, and pervasive corporate surveillance" -- a culture where the female workforce was, in Lichtenstein's words, "cheap and grateful."
If Wal-Mart's success depended first on this Bentonville subculture, it was also based on the creation of an advanced global system for manufacturing cheap goods and a pioneering bar-code-based computerized shipping network that got the goods to the stores in record time...
...Lichtenstein is a historian, and he does a beautiful job of putting Wal-Mart in its historical context. The glory days of Wal-Mart were the Reagan-Clinton-Bush years, the years of unions in retreat, global free trade, lax enforcement of labor laws, and, for most Americans, stagnating wages that led them to seek cheap consumer goods.
But that era has finally come to an end, and with Barack Obama in the White House, Lichtenstein argues. Wal-Mart faces "a day of reckoning": The Democrats will raise the minimum wage, encourage unionization, rigorously enforce laws governing wages and hours, and require employers to pay some of the health insurance costs of their workers...
Read entire article at LA Times
The Retail Revolution
How Wal-Mart Created a
Brave New World of Business
Nelson Lichtenstein
Metropolitan Books: 312 pp., $25
Bentonville, Ark., may be unknown to most Americans, but it is the center of the world for some 750 corporations that manufacture consumer goods -- because Bentonville is the legendary home office of Wal-Mart, and those corporations want to sell their products to the world's largest retailer. It's also the largest private employer in the nation, operator of 4,200 stores.
Bentonville is a key to understanding the success of Wal-Mart, historian Nelson Lichtenstein argues in his terrific book, "The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business." Legendary founder Sam Walton didn't start in Bentonville, in the Ozarks in northwestern Arkansas. The first store he ran in the late 1940s was in Newport, Ark., in the Black Belt along the Mississippi where chain stores like Woolworth's soon became the target of sit-ins and business boycotts organized by the nascent civil rights movement.
But when Walton lost his lease on his first store in 1950 in the Delta he decided to relocate to the Ozarks, far from the social conflicts of the midcentury South. He was able to develop his business in a remote, isolated area. "The Ozarks were not just rural and poor," Lichtenstein writes. "They have long been uniquely homogeneous, among the most exclusively white regions in the nation."
One of Lichtenstein's most original contributions is his argument that Wal-Mart created its own corporate subculture rooted in this region. Sam Walton said Wal-Mart workers were "a family," and Lichtenstein writes that the company would create "a self-contained corporate culture, an ideology of family, faith, and folk communalism that to this day co-exists in a strange harmony with a Dickensian world of low wages, job insecurity, and pervasive corporate surveillance" -- a culture where the female workforce was, in Lichtenstein's words, "cheap and grateful."
If Wal-Mart's success depended first on this Bentonville subculture, it was also based on the creation of an advanced global system for manufacturing cheap goods and a pioneering bar-code-based computerized shipping network that got the goods to the stores in record time...
...Lichtenstein is a historian, and he does a beautiful job of putting Wal-Mart in its historical context. The glory days of Wal-Mart were the Reagan-Clinton-Bush years, the years of unions in retreat, global free trade, lax enforcement of labor laws, and, for most Americans, stagnating wages that led them to seek cheap consumer goods.
But that era has finally come to an end, and with Barack Obama in the White House, Lichtenstein argues. Wal-Mart faces "a day of reckoning": The Democrats will raise the minimum wage, encourage unionization, rigorously enforce laws governing wages and hours, and require employers to pay some of the health insurance costs of their workers...