Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism

Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism. Edited by Nelson Lichtenstein. (New York: New Press, 2006. Pp. xv, 349. Acknowledgments, preface, illustrations, tables, maps, notes, contributors, index. $21.95, paper.) The well-written, accessible, and highly informative essays collected by Nelson Lichtenstein in Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism ask two interrelated questions: What is new about this entity called Wal-Mart? And where did beast come from? These are not easy questions. Could it be that is simply latest company to figure out how best to make a profit off America's consumer culture? Is it just an enlarged version of early twentieth-century predecessors such as Woolworth, Sears, and A & P? Is Wal-Mart's impact on workers, communities, and businesses fundamentally different from past corporate giants such as GM and IBM? How did world's largest corporation get its start in (of all places) Arkansas? The book provides no easy or simplistic answers. In this respect, it is a refreshing and much-needed corrective to hyperbole surrounding company. is often seen either as source of all evil or as poster child for a globalized economy. To its credit, this collection, although critical of many of Wal-Mart's practices, policies, and impacts, is not ready to reduce ills or virtues of modern capitalism to one corporation. Nelson Lichtenstein starts with a fabulous introductory chapter that highlights all that is old and new about Wal-Mart. As he writes, Wal-Mart is now template for world capitalism because it takes most potent technological and logistic innovations . . . and puts them at service of an organization whose competitive success depends upon destruction of all that remains of New Deal social regulation and replaces it, in U.S. and abroad, with a global system that relentlessly squeezes labor. It has made the retailer king and manufacturer his vassal (pp. 4-5). The second chapter, by Susan Strasser, historicizes by situating its rise within context of dominant retailing firms that came before it. It is a fascinating story that takes us through first department stores, mail-order houses, and supermarkets. Strasser concludes that WalMart learned well from its forerunners by serving neglected rural market once targeted by mail-order houses while putting department store and supermarket under a single roof. …