cover image THE UNITED STATES OF WAL-MART

THE UNITED STATES OF WAL-MART

John Dicker, . . Penguin/Tarcher, $12.95 (245pp) ISBN 978-1-58542-422-1

Although it's getting too big to be a microcosm, Wal-Mart is a fair representation of many of the most troubling aspects of the American economy, according to this lively and insightful profile of the big-box retail leviathan. Former Colorado Springs Independent staff writer Dicker admirably sums up the conventional complaints against Wal-Mart, detailing poverty-level wages, skimpy benefits, scorched-earth antiunion policies, shuttered smalltown Main Streets, suburban sprawl abetment and rampant outsourcing. Behind the facade of "corn-pone populism" fostered by folksy but steely founder Sam Walton, Dicker asserts, Wal-Mart has become a "global despot." Dicker's analysis is unsparing but balanced. He sympathizes (and sometimes strategizes) with Wal-Mart opponents, but also chides them for ignoring the appeal of the company's cheap, convenient offerings to cash-strapped customers and underserved communities. And Wal-Mart's sins, he argues, are America's; the company merely caters to the national religion of consumer entitlement that assumes shoppers have no interests in common with workers and puts low prices ahead of any social consequences. Aside from some pointless and tiresome lapses into prison-chic posturing ("[w]e're all Wal-Mart's bitches"), Dicker conveys a wealth of information in a lucid and light-handed style. (June)

FYI: For the company line, check out this month's The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the World's Largest Company by Don Soderquist, who was vice chair and COO from 1988 to 1999 (Nelson Business, $24.99 256p ISBN 0-7852-6119-2).