| 
| Author: Charles Fishman
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy Used: $1.56
You Save: $24.39 (94%)
New (26) Used (47) Collectible (1) from $1.56
Avg. Customer Rating:  103 reviews
Sales Rank: 91516
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 1594200769
Dewey Decimal Number: 381.1490973
EAN: 9781594200762
Publication Date: January 19, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Used - Good; Shows moderate wear. Will be shipped promptly!
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Nothing new or insightful August 1, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Fishman spends the first 30 pages hinting that Wal-mart forced its suppliers out of business by demanding lower prices. This may sound horrifying to you, but demanding lower costs is industry standard for retailers. If you owned a store, would you voluntarily offer your supplier more money?
If your knowledge of Wal-mart and retailing is limited to what you've heard on the 6 o'clock news, this book gives you a peek into that world. But it falls far short of it's claims to expose "how the world's most powerful company really works". The author openly admits that there is almost no information on Wal-mart, so what he has is anecdotal and fragmented and not particularly convincing.
Unfortunately, Fishman is unable to break out of the standard Wal-mart bashing arguments around "low wages" (which are not unreasonably low at ~$10/hr), "forcing local business to close" (any large, well-run retailer could have caused it), and "cheap goods made in deplorable conditions" (unfortunately, some factory owners don't have the same morals as we do. Paying more won't for something won't result in better standards, just more money for the owner).
Verdict: Borrow at your library.
 Is Walmart Good or Bad? Answer: It's both!! July 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a very good book, well-researched and well-reported, about a subject that affects us all, the biggest company in history, Walmart.
Is Walmart good or bad? The answer according to Charles Fishman is: "Yes, it is both". I just didn't realize how big Walmart is and how much it does affect us.
Walmart is a monster player in the economy, the largest company in history, and nobody outside of Walmart knows much about it. It is committed to low prices like a missionary is committed to the Word of God, but is unfortunately short on a sense of repentance for its shortcomings and a little short on the joy that a true missionary should ideally have. It might however finally be coming around if its generous response to Katrina is any indication.
I read this book, believe it or not, to learn a little more about the economy through the prism of Walmart. Sometimes it is easier to me to learn something indirectly: by learning how Walmart functions and interacts with the economy is to learn about the economy itself. I would also like to know how Walmart creates so much economic weather. I think I've only been in a Walmart once and had the impression it was way too big and too far to walk for everyday shopping. Also, it seems to get a lot of press about how it could be more employee-aware and environmentally correct. Charles Fishman seems to think they finally get this message and is cautiously optimistic about their correcting some things.
One of the things I learned about the economy is how interconnected it is with everything around us. For Walmart, it involves customers, suppliers, the government, other countries, and, of course, the economy itself. This book, to its credit, is not short on statistical information, especially since studying the impact of Walmart requires a lot of digging; the company is simply NOT forthcoming.
I think I was most impressed by the scale of all things Walmart and the great veil of secrecy that surrounds it. The world doesn't understand it and it doesn't really understand why the world can have any problem with low prices. But the good news is that it is apparently trying to understand and do better. We can all learn from that.
A highly fascinating book July 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you see this book on the bookshelf, and don't know much about Wal-Mart (as is the case with me), you probably couldn't imagine just how far-reaching this "Wal-Mart effect" is in the US and other countries. From its role at the core of the US economy, to its effect on the inflation rate, to both the lifeline and downfall it is for tens of thousands of suppliers at the same time, to dictating changes in consumer habits, to its sheer scale, to the way it completely reshuffles the job market wherever it opens store, to the way national consumer research is distorted by their policy of secrecy, to the remarkable link between poverty and Wal-Mart's presence found by a peer-reviewed study that controlled for all other causes of poverty, make for eye-opening and gripping reading across the board. Also note that that was by no means an exhaustive list.
The book makes no exceptions: sometimes the facts and anecdotes cast the company in a positive light, sometimes an inevitably negative one. Adding insult to injury, for example, the book highlights Wal-Mart's role as the primary driving force in the environmental iniquity that is Chilean salmon farms, responsible for dumping vast quantities of effluents containing chemicals and feces into its waters - creating dead zones, as well as the fiasco that is the uncovering of incredibly inhumane working conditions in Bangladeshi factories and elsewhere.
Fortunately, Wal-Mart's purchasing power probably (arguably) gives them the most leverage in the world for forcing the adoption of more environmentally sound policies (as a corporation), but how they will exercise this power is unclear (they are in talks with various environmental groups, and have made some preliminary promises at the time of writing, but accountability debates will probably still debilitate the outcome)
A rabid pressure for lower prices (at the cost of many well-meaning US suppliers and manufacturers, unfortunately) are among the things that enabled Wal-Mart to rise to the top so swiftly - they've surpassed GM, IBM, GE, Ford, ExxonMobil in just 9 years time to become the biggest company in the United States and on Earth, with $387.69 billion in revenue (2007), and that from their humble beginnings in Bentonville, Arkansas (the town where their main operations still reside to this day).
As an aside, I might add something about the author. I've only started reading business books, but Charles Fishman hit the bulls-eye with the kind of conversational style I like. Having recently read works by authors Paul Hawken (an excellent author albeit using a high level of jargon and a less conversational style) and Thomas Friedman (too sloppy - even irksome at times, if you will), Fishman achieves a very good balance that makes reading his work a great pleasure.
As for his overall stance in this book, it is apparent that he didn't purposely write it either to praise or criticize Wal-Mart, and he demonstrates this in a comment toward the end: "You could easily write a book about the ways in which Wal-Mart is good, and a book about the ways in which Wal-Mart is bad. It's the wrong question. It's like asking if the car is good for America".
A whole new perspective of looking at Walmart June 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book does not try to justify Walmart as good or evil. All this book does is provide the reader a whole new perspective of Walmart. I was amazed at how much I never knew (or never cared to find out) about Walmart inspite of shopping there almost 2-3 times a month. What I could grasp out of this book is that Walmart does what it has to in order to survive in today's cut-throat competetive world. And Walmart is able to do that because of its consumers (that would be us). Although I do not approve of all WM's practices, I'd still buy there. Why? Because I can save a few bucks! The one thing mentioned in this book I liked most is when the author mentioned something like this... Is it okay if some of us loose there jobs so that toothpaste and underwear and deodorant become cheaper for all of us? The answer is a resounding YES... As much as I'd like to disagree with the above statement, I can not. And I think most of you wouldn't care also as long as the person loosing the job is not your family member or neighbor. This book is criticising Walmart's practices as much as it is criticising all of us consumers. I thouroughly enjoyed this book and actually learned a lot from it. Highly recommened!
 mind-boggling facts and figures June 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The overall theme of this book is that for every Wal-Mart action there is both a positive and negative impact for those involved. The first example of this(in the book)is that of underarm deodorant, in which Wal-Mart convinced suppliers to do away with the individual cardboard packaging, resulting in a saving of one nickel per deodorant bottle. This equates to a saving of $10 million (assuming the 200 million adults in America purchased a bottle of deodorant). Of this $10 million dollar saving, the `winners' were the customer, who got to keep half ($5 million), while the suppliers got to keep the other half. The nation has saved hundreds of millions of dollars since the disappearance of the deodorant cardboard box. The `losers' were the cardboard manufacturers who lost a lot of business due to the cancellations of these cardboard boxes. There are many more examples like this in the book.
Wal-Mart's buying power provides everyday savings to consumers on most lines of merchandise. The majority of the costs squeezed out of suppliers is passed on to the consumer and not to Wal-Mart's bottom line.
With all the negative press that Wal-Mart receives, there is no denying the global dominance of a company who would not be the size or success that it is, if not for the consumers, who vote with their wallets everyday in one of the 4000 plus facilities.
I found the material in this book to be well researched and informative with many mind-boggling facts and figures.
|
|
|
