The Wal-Mart Effect and a Decent Society:Who Knew Shopping Was So Important?Charles Fishman*

Executive OverviewThe phrase “The Wal-Mart Effect” has made its way into the culture as a shorthand for the range of effectsresulting from Wal-Mart’s way of doing business. A megacorporation with sales that consistently rank it asthe number-one or number-two publicly traded company in the United States and in the world, Wal-Marthas impacted wage rates, prices, and economies on a local, national, and global scale. It is arguably theworld’s most important privately controlled economic institution. It not only has no rivals, it actuallyinfluences the prices set by its suppliers and has often seemed impervious to challenge, let aloneaccountability. Many of the most basic and most urgent questions about Wal-Mart, those at the core of apublic debate over the “Wal-Mart Effect,” go unanswered. Wal-Mart’s own 40-year history of absolutesecrecy, including forbidding its suppliers to talk about their relationship with Wal-Mart, has only deepenedthe mystery of its impact. Answering the questions is vital—not just to understand the impact of Wal-Martbut to understand the behavior and impact of all kinds of megacorporations emerging in the globaleconomy.

The question of how to assure that American capi-talism creates a decent society is one that will engageall of us in the era ahead.

—Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott, February 2005

Starting in the early 1990s, a change sweptthrough a line of products that most adultAmericans use every day. Until then, nearly

every brand and style of deodorant—roll-on andsolid, powder-fresh and unscented—came in apaperboard box. You opened the box, pulled outthe container of deodorant, and pitched the boxin the garbage. In the early 1990s, Wal-Mart,among other retailers, decided the paperboard boxwas a waste. It added nothing to the customer’sdeodorant experience. The product already camein a can or a plastic container that was at least astough as the box, if not tougher. The box took upshelf space. It wasted cardboard. Shipping theweight of the cardboard wasted fuel. The box itselfcost money to design, to produce—it even costmoney to put the deodorant inside the box, just sothe customer could take it out. With the kind ofquiet but irresistible force that Wal-Mart can ap-

ply, the retailer asked deodorant makers to elim-inate the box—to unbox the antiperspirant.

The box turned out to cost about a nickel forevery container of deodorant. Wal-Mart typicallysplit the savings—letting deodorant makers keep acouple pennies and passing a couple pennies insavings along to its antiperspirant customers.

Walk into a Wal-Mart today, and pause in thedeodorant aisle: eight shelves of deodorant, 60containers across. In a well-tended Wal-Martstore, nearly 500 containers of deodorant face you.Not one box. Walk into any large chain storenow—Walgreens, Target, Eckerd, CVS—and goto the deodorant aisle. Not one box.

Entire forests have not fallen in part because ofthe decision made in the Wal-Mart home office atthe intersection of Walton Boulevard and SW 8thStreet in Bentonville, Arkansas, to eliminate thebox. The nickel savings may seem trivial, untilyou do the math. With 200 million adults in theUnited States, accounting only for the nickel fromthe container in their medicine cabinets right

* Charles Fishman (cnfish@mindspring.com) is a senior writer at the business magazine Fast Company and the author of the bestsellingbook The Wal-Mart Effect, Penguin Press © 2006 by Charles Fishman, from which this is an excerpt.

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now, the savings is $10 million, of which custom-ers got to keep half, $5 million, just for one smallchange that went unnoticed more than a decadeago. The savings brought about by the change ispermanent. American consumers are saving $5million in nickels five or six times each year onjust one product. The nation has saved hundredsof millions of dollars since the deodorant boxdisappeared. It’s a perfect Wal-Mart moment—the company used its insight and its influence tohelp make a substantial change with an impactthat reached beyond the product aisle. Millions oftrees were not cut down, acres of cardboard werenot manufactured only to be discarded, one billiondeodorant boxes didn’t end up in landfills eachyear. It’s all unseen, all unnoticed, and all good.Right?

Unless, of course, you were in the paperboard-box-making business. During those years whenyou took a call from every single deodorant makerin America canceling their standing order for box-es—those were rough times.

Wal-Mart changes markets across the globe inthis way every day, and has for decades. A wastefulroutine, often long entrenched, is detected andeliminated, while a new standard of efficiency thatlowers costs for everyone, especially ordinary con-sumers, is established. In the wake of the changecomes a ripple of consequences—if not quite un-intended, at least unacknowledged. This ripple isthe Wal-Mart effect: the ways both small andprofound that Wal-Mart has changed business,work, the shape and well-being of communities,and everyday life in the United States and aroundthe world.

The phrase itself—“the Wal-Mart effect”—hasmade its way into the culture as a shorthand forthe range of effects resulting from Wal-Mart’s wayof doing business. As a phrase, the Wal-Marteffect itself reveals our own conflicted feelingsabout the company. The Wal-Mart effect is neverused as simply a description; it is never neutral.But neither is the Wal-Mart effect presumptivelynegative, or presumptively positive. It takes itsspin from the context.

The Wal-Mart effect is when Wal-Mart startsselling groceries in a new area, bringing lower

prices to its own shoppers and, through competi-tion, driving down the prices of established gro-cery stores as well.

The Wal-Mart effect is when Wal-Mart, or anybig-box retailer, comes into town, reshapes shop-ping habits, and drains the viability of traditionallocal shopping areas or mom-and-pop shops.

The Wal-Mart effect is the relentless down-ward pressure on the prices of everyday necessitiesthat a single vast retailer can exert on behalf ofconsumers.

The Wal-Mart effect is the suburbanization ofshopping; the downward pressure on wages at allkinds of stores trying to compete with Wal-Mart;the consolidation of consumer product companiestrying to match Wal-Mart’s scale; the relentlessscrutiny of unnecessary costs that allows compa-nies to survive on thinner profits; the success of alarge business at the expense of its rivals and theway in which that success builds on itself.

Wal-Mart’s brilliant, obsessive focus on a singlecore value—delivering low prices—created whatbecame the largest and most powerful company inhistory. And yet the drive for low prices is also thecause of the troubling elements of the Wal-Marteffect: low wages, unrelenting pressure on suppli-ers, products cheap in quality as well as price, andoffshoring of jobs.

Wal-Mart is arguably the world’s most impor-tant privately controlled economic institution. Itnot only has no rivals, it has often seemed imper-vious to challenge, let alone accountability. Manyof the most basic and most urgent questions aboutWal-Mart, those at the core of the public debate,are unanswered. Wal-Mart’s own 40-year historyof absolute secrecy, including forbidding its sup-pliers to talk about their relationship with Wal-Mart, has only deepened the mystery of its impact.

How much does Wal-Mart really lower prices?Does Wal-Mart raise our standard of living whileit lowers prices? Does Wal-Mart bring businessesto the communities where it opens, or does it killbusinesses already in them? Does Wal-Mart reallymake its suppliers more efficient? Is doing businesswith Wal-Mart good for a company’s financialhealth? Does Wal-Mart send factory jobs overseas?

And where exactly does all that merchandisemade overseas come from, who makes it, and are

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they happy new members of the global economyor indentured factory serfs? Are we shopping our-selves out of not only good factory jobs in theUnited States but also out of a safe environment,since overseas factories make toys and apparel andpower tools for us without the need to adhere tosafety and pollution regulations?

In the end, the real question is about howmuch Wal-Mart really saves the consumer, as wellas whether or not those savings dramatically offsetthe costs of the Wal-Mart effect. Put another way,do the costs of the Wal-Mart effect, scattered infactories and towns across the country and aroundthe world, add up to far more than the dimes anddollars Wal-Mart allows each of us to keep in ourpockets?

The very range of questions, their complexity,and their significance demonstrate the impor-tance of the Wal-Mart effect. Answering the ques-tions is vital—not just to understanding the im-pact of Wal-Mart but to understanding thebehavior and impact of all kinds of companies inthe global economy. Wal-Mart is so large, itsreach so great, that it has created an ecosystem inwhich its suppliers and competitors, and theirsuppliers and competitors, and their customers, alloperate. Wal-Mart sets the metabolism, it sets therules, of that ecosystem. Wal-Mart has inexorablychanged our expectations as shoppers—and theWal-Mart effect also extends to consumers whonever shop at Wal-Mart. Likewise, Wal-Mart hasreshaped the companies that supply it—and it hasalso reset the pace and the competitive landscapeeven for companies that try to do business outsidethe Wal-Mart ecosystem.

Supercenters, Supersized

At about the same time deodorant was comingout of its box, Wal-Mart began experimentingwith the idea of doubling the size of some of its

new stores in order to start selling groceries along-side general merchandise in a format it calledSupercenters. When Wal-Mart first started nudg-ing into the grocery business, everyone in theUnited States already had well-established gro-cery-buying habits. No one was waiting for a Wal-Mart to open to buy a gallon of milk or a jar ofspaghetti sauce or a package of boneless chicken

breasts. The supermarket business was dominatedby well-established, deeply experienced, well-runnational chains. Albertsons was founded in 1939.Safeway was founded in 1915. Kroger was foundedby Barney Kroger in 1883. Into that familiar group15 years ago stepped Wal-Mart, which had estab-lished just nine Supercenters by the end of 1990.

Ten years later, by the end of 2000, Wal-Marthad opened 888 Supercenters, an average of sevennew Supercenters per month, 120 months in arow. Wal-Mart had become the number-one foodretailer in the nation. In little more than a decade,from a standing start, Wal-Mart mastered the U.S.grocery business and remade what turned out to bea complacent industry in its wake. It is an aston-ishing achievement. Today, Wal-Mart sells moregroceries than any company not just in the UnitedStates but in the world. It now operates 2,074Supercenters, 1,200 more than it had five yearsago. That is, in the last five years, having alreadyconquered the supermarket business, Wal-Marthas dramatically increased the pace of its groceryinvasion; it has opened an average of 16 newSupercenters each month over the last five years.

In fact, we find the pull of Wal-Mart irresist-ible, and Wal-Mart itself has not hesitated in theface of our appetite. In 2004 alone, in the UnitedStates, the company opened 245 new Supercent-ers—the combined general merchandise and gro-cery stores—in 35 states. That’s four new Super-centers a week. Although 90 percent of us alreadylive within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart, the companypicked up the pace in 2005. The company opened267 new Supercenters in the U.S. in 2005—fiveper week, one every business day of the year.

In groceries, as in other areas of retail, Wal-Mart is not simply the first among equals; it isunchallenged. The company that essentially didnot exist as a grocer 15 years ago now sells morefood than Kroger and Safeway combined. Nation-wide, Wal-Mart’s share of the grocery market isapproximately 16 percent. Within individual cit-ies, however, it has a 25 or 30 percent share of thegrocery market. In places like Dallas, Memphis,and Oklahoma City, one out of four, or one ofthree, families do their food shopping at a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Wal-Mart’s grocery departments—in Super-

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centers, about 40 percent of the floor space isdevoted to groceries—are not particularly appeal-ing places to shop. The aisles are long, the staffingis thin, the stocking often spotty and chaotic, theproduce ample but undistinguished. But whenWal-Mart starts selling groceries in a new city, itquickly wins business in a simple, potent way: Itsprices are about 15 percent lower on exactly thesame foods sold elsewhere. You can buy freshsalmon from the Wal-Mart seafood display case for$4.84 a pound, a price so low it almost seems toogood to be true. For a family of four who mightspend $500 a month on groceries, Wal-Mart’s 15percent lower prices translate into savings of hun-dreds of dollars a year, just for driving to a differ-ent store.

Wal-Mart didn’t just change the lives andspending habits of grocery shoppers, though. Itchanged the very ecosystem and rhythm of thesupermarket business, often with devastating con-sequences for those who couldn’t adjust. In thesame decade that Wal-Mart has come to dominatethe grocery business in the United States, 31supermarket chains have sought bankruptcy pro-tection; 27 of these chains cite competition fromWal-Mart as a factor. That, too, is the Wal-Marteffect.

Wal-Mart isn’t just a store, or a huge company,or a phenomenon anymore. Wal-Mart shapeswhere we shop, the products we buy, and theprices we pay, even for those of us who never shopthere. It reaches deep inside the operations of thecompanies that supply it and changes not onlywhat they sell, but also how those products arepackaged and presented, what the lives of thefactory workers who make the products are like,sometimes even the countries where those facto-ries are located. Wal-Mart reaches around theglobe, shaping the work and the lives of peoplewho make toys in China, or raise salmon in Chile,or sew shirts in Bangladesh, even though they maynever visit a Wal-Mart store in their lives.

Wal-Mart has even changed the way we thinkabout ourselves—as shoppers, as consumers. Wal-Mart has changed our sense of quality, it haschanged our sense of what a good deal is. Wal-Mart’s low prices routinely reset our expectationsabout what all kinds of things should cost—from

clothing to furniture to fresh fish. Wal-Mart haschanged the lens through which we see the world.It has reshaped the economic life of the towns andcities where it opens stores; it also has reshapedthe economic life of the United States—a singlecompany that steadily, silently, purposefullymoves the largest economy in history. In essence,Wal-Mart has become the most powerful, mostinfluential company in the world.

Who knew shopping would turn out to be soimportant?

Wal-Mart’sMarketplace

More than half of all Americans live withinfive miles of a Wal-Mart store, less than aten-minute drive away. Ninety percent of

Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart.On the nation’s interstates, it is rare to go aquarter-hour without seeing a Wal-Mart truck.

Wal-Mart now has 3,889 stores in the UnitedStates (including 10 in Alaska and 10 in Hawaii);this distribution means there is more than oneWal-Mart store for every single county in thecountry. In most of America, Wal-Mart is not justunavoidable, it has become a kind of nationalcommons. Every seven days more than 130 mil-lion Americans shop at Wal-Mart—equivalent to40 percent of the country. Each year, 93 percent ofAmerican households shop at least once at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart’s sales in the United States areequal to $2,172.72 spent there by every U.S.household in the last year. (Wal-Mart’s profit onthat $2,172 was just $79.) If your family didn’tspend $2,000 at Wal-Mart last year, well, someoneelse’s spent $3,000.

And it’s not just the United States. Wal-Martis the largest retailer in both Mexico and Canada,and the second largest grocer in England. World-wide, so many people shop at Wal-Mart that thisyear 7.2 billion people will go to a Wal-Mart store.The Earth’s population is only 6.4 billion, so thisyear the equivalent of every person on the planetwill visit a Wal-Mart, with nearly a billion visitsleft over.

Wal-Mart’s scale can be hard to absorb. Thecompany isn’t just the largest retailer in the nationand in the world. For most of this decade, Wal-Mart has also been both the largest company in

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the world, and the largest company in the historyof the world. In 2006, Wal-Mart was bumped fromthe number-one spot on the Fortune 500 list ofthe largest companies by ExxonMobil, whose salessurged past Wal-Mart’s, but only because theworld price of oil has risen by a third in the lastyear. Wal-Mart’s dominance really remains unri-valed, as revealed by a single statistic. ExxonMobilemploys about 84,000 people worldwide; Wal-Mart employs 1.8 million. ExxonMobil is growingby raising prices; Wal-Mart is growing despitelowering prices.

As a store, Wal-Mart isn’t just the largest; it nolonger has any near rivals. Wal-Mart is as big asHome Depot, Kroger, Target, Costco, Sears, andKmart combined. Target, which is consideredWal-Mart’s nearest direct rival and its most astutecompetitor, is small by comparison. Each yearWal-Mart sells more by Saint Patrick’s Day,March 17, than Target sells all year.

In the last two years, Wal-Mart has added moredollars in sales than Target’s total sales per year. Itis precisely that scale, built out of our own pur-chases, $5 and $10 and $20 at a time, that powersthe Wal-Mart effect. In many ways, we all nowlive in the Wal-Mart economy—the literal ver-sion, if not the metaphoric one. The reach wouldbe bemusing if it weren’t so encompassing.

No business comes close to Wal-Mart’s domi-nance across not just the consumer economy, butthe economy as a whole, or ever has. The Wal-Mart effect is evident every day. Sears and Kmartwere crippled by effective competition from Wal-Mart—their merger is just a desperate grasp atsurvival in the face of Wal-Mart’s relentless com-petence. It won’t be clear for several years whethertheir marriage will reveal some previously hiddenstrategy for success. Still, Sears and Kmart com-bined are now the size Wal-Mart was in 1993,one-fifth of Wal-Mart’s current size.

Toys “R” Us, the company that invented the“category killer” store back in the 1950s and trans-formed the way toys were sold in the UnitedStates, wilted in its race against Wal-Mart. Since1998, Wal-Mart has sold more toys in the UnitedStates than Toys “R” Us. In early 2005, Toys “R”Us sold itself to a trio of private equity investorswho were as interested in the chain’s real estate as

its toy business. As a result, Toys “R” Us is ex-pected to shrink further rather than win back toycustomers from Wal-Mart.

Winn-Dixie, the venerable if increasinglyshabby $11 billion grocery chain, was forced intobankruptcy in 2005 because of its inability tocompete with Wal-Mart. It closed one-third of its920 stores, and laid off 22,000 employees.

Procter & Gamble and Gillette, two of theworld’s most stable and innovative consumerproducts companies, agreed to a merger that willcost P&G $57 billion and create a single companythat sells everything from Duracell batteries toTampax tampons, Pringles potato chips to Oral-Btoothbrushes. Together, the companies have 21brands that each has $1 billion in sales or more.The merger was motivated in part by the compa-nies’ need to maintain scale in the face of Wal-Mart. The combined company will have sales of$62 billion a year, of which $10 billion will be atWal-Mart, 16 percent of the business. Deep insideits financial filings with the U.S. government,P&G reports that before the merger, Wal-Martwas 17 percent of its business. It also reports thatits top-ten retail customers are 33 percent of itsbusiness. What this share means is that Wal-Martis not just P&G’s number-one customer—it’s big-ger than the next nine customers combined. Sothe really interesting question is whether the pur-chase of Gillette by P&G gives the company moreleverage with Wal-Mart—or whether it givesWal-Mart yet more muscle with a bigger P&G.

Beyond its ascendancy in sales, Wal-Mart is thenation’s, and the world’s, largest private employer,with 1.8 million “associates,” as the company re-fers to its employees. In the United States another3.5 million people have jobs directly dependenton purchases from Wal-Mart, according to Wal-Mart’s figures. Most of us shop at Wal-Mart, butmany of us are also dependent on the company forour income, or know someone who is, even if thatperson doesn’t actually work at Wal-Mart but atone of its suppliers.

It’s not just Wal-Mart’s presence as a merchantand employer that is so pervasive. Each monthWal-Mart’s announcement of its sales is good fora full 24-hour cycle of news coverage, more ifWal-Mart surges or stumbles, because Wal-Mart’s

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performance is considered a vital indicator oftrends in the U.S. economy overall—are wespending confidently or not?

In the last five years, a national debate aboutWal-Mart’s impact—about the wide spectrum ofthe Wal-Mart effect—has escalated into a seriesof skirmishes being fought not only in the mediaand at zoning hearings but also in the courtroom.Wal-Mart’s practices, the way it treats its employ-ees, the way it treats its suppliers, the way it treatscommunities, and its motivation—its very soul—are all subjects of such bitter contention that it ishard to imagine that partisans are actually describ-ing the same institution. Wal-Mart is either one ofthe boldest, most democratic creations in humanhistory, a validation of free markets, harnessing itsenormous power on behalf of the needs of ordi-nary people; or it is an insatiable, insidious beast,exploiting the people it pretends to defend.

TheBirthofaGiant

Wal-Mart’s beginnings in a remote corner ofArkansas are now, quite rightly, the stuff ofAmerican business legend. The first Wal-

Mart opened in 1962; that same year also saw theopening of the first Target and the first Kmart.Wal-Mart was the creation of a single man, SamWalton, who latched onto a single idea that hesomehow knew in his gut was singularly powerful:Sell stuff that people need every day just a littlecheaper than everyone else, sell it at that lowprice all the time, and customers will flock to you.That single idea drove Walton to keep the costs ofhis own company as modest as possible, and sooncaused Wal-Mart to ask whether its supplierscouldn’t be more frugal too and lower the price oftheir products. As Wal-Mart gained scale, growingin rural areas where it brought a range of selectionand price not previously available, the questionsto suppliers became a way of doing business, aculture of looking for every penny of cost savingsthat could be wrung out of designs, packaging,labor, materials, transportation, even the stockingof stores. It is that cascade of frugality, questions,and pressure that creates the Wal-Mart effect.

Sam Walton did not set out to create thelargest company in history, nor was Wal-Martborn with power and impact. Wal-Mart #2, in

Harrison, Arkansas, 90 miles east of Bentonville,originally opened in a shaggy strip mall, set up insuch a way that if the Wal-Mart idea didn’t workout that well, the store itself could be choppedback, and the unneeded selling space walled offand subleased to some other store. That was in1964, when #2 started out at about 8,000 squarefeet. It has moved twice in Harrison, and today #2is a Supercenter 20 times the size of the original.

As hard as it sometimes is for people outsideBentonville to believe, the stories of Sam Wal-ton’s modesty, unpretentiousness, and frugality areauthentic. You can be modest, unpretentious, fru-gal—and also driven, tireless, and determined todrive a hard bargain. Those are the values thatSam Walton infused into his company—into hisstores, his managers, his staff, his way of doingbusiness every day. And if you look at Wal-Marttoday—at the peak of its power—it still embodiesthose values: modesty, unpretentiousness, frugal-ity, drive, energy, and determination to drive ahard bargain.

It is part of what is so confounding about Wal-Mart—how bad could a place be if the vice pres-idents furnish their headquarters offices with cast-off samples of lawn chairs from vendors? Thosevalues are the source of Wal-Mart’s success. It isno accident that the largest company in historygrew up in rural Arkansas, far from the distrac-tions, the noise, the competing priorities andmuddled values of the big cities. It’s easy to makefun of little ol’ Bentonville, but only if you’venever been there.

But Wal-Mart has outgrown Bentonville. Notphysically, but psychologically, politically, socio-logically. Wal-Mart has literally outgrown the val-ues that governed its incredible growth in the last40 years, the values that powered that growth.

The source of almost all of Wal-Mart’s trou-bles can be traced not to some evil conspiracyspun out of the home office, but to the sloganprinted right on every Wal-Mart bag: “Alwayslow prices. Always.” The second always is initalics and underlined, just so there’s no confu-sion about the mission.

Does Wal-Mart pay modestly? Absolutely.They do so on behalf of us—their customers—toenable Wal-Mart to deliver always low prices. All

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of Wal-Mart’s profit wouldn’t get its workers to$12 an hour—still less than $500 a week. SoWal-Mart could pay better—it could offer betterhealth insurance—but it would have to raiseprices. And that violates the fundamental missionof the company.

Does Wal-Mart squeeze its suppliers to delivermerchandise at the lowest possible price? DoesWal-Mart hold the trump card of substitutinglower-cost imported goods if a supplier is too fin-icky to do what’s necessary to get the costs down?Absolutely. That’s the very reason for Wal-Mart’sexistence—and it’s hardly a secret. If a suppliercan’t cope, sell elsewhere. Not a problem.

Does Wal-Mart extract concessions from localgovernments for roads and property taxes andzoning as it builds stores? Absolutely. Anythingless would be a waste of money—a waste of cus-tomers’ money.

Does Wal-Mart come into a town and competehard for business against the local hardware store,and the local clothing shop, and also against thebig chain grocery stores and other national dis-counters? Absolutely. It is common for local mer-chants to complain that they can literally buytheir own stock more cheaply at Wal-Mart—atretail—than their wholesale suppliers sell it tothem. But here’s the thing: No matter how thecompetitive landscape evolves, Wal-Mart neverlooks around and decides to raise prices. Whetherthe local merchants, or Wal-Mart’s big-box col-leagues, find a way to compete in a particulartown, or go out of business, Wal-Mart does notexploit its customers in victory. Wal-Mart is bru-tally competitive, but it is not technically preda-tory. It’s not “low prices until the competitors arestrangled”—it’s “always low prices.” It is that veryOlympian, almost austere, relentlessness thatcomes directly from Sam Walton that makes Wal-Mart so difficult to compete against. Wal-Martnever takes a breath. If you take a breath, youmight have to raise prices.

The mission is so imperative that it now some-times comes unmoored from ordinary restraintsand causes people at Wal-Mart to do things thatare appalling, unethical, even illegal. The moti-vation—always low prices—doesn’t begin to ex-

cuse the behavior, or justify it. But it does explainit.

Did Wal-Mart lock its employees inside somestores overnight? Absolutely. Lightly supervisedemployees have a tendency to steal stuff, and theftultimately costs customers money. Employees whoare locked inside stores can’t walk off with themerchandise.

Did some managers force store employees topunch out, and keep working? Absolutely. Store-level managers have a certain amount of auton-omy, and a lot of responsibility. One of the mosturgent responsibilities is to control their laborbudget. Bonuses are tied to store performance, andstore performance is really built on two big items:sales and staff costs. What better way to keeppersonnel costs under control than to insist thathourly associates haven’t gotten their assignedjobs done in the allotted time, and then forcethem to finish that work off the clock.

Did Wal-Mart end up using hundreds of illegalimmigrants to clean its stores overnight? Abso-lutely. Wal-Mart hired the least expensive clean-ing contractors it could find—it turned out theywere cheap for an unpleasant reason.

It is remarkable that almost all of Wal-Mart’sbehavior—even the bad behavior or the seem-ingly diabolical behavior—can be explained bytaking Wal-Mart at its word. It really is all about“always low prices.” That’s a testament to theshaping power of that one idea, which Wal-Marthas turned into an obsession, almost a corporatefetish. And it’s testament to the consistency anddiscipline of Wal-Mart’s culture.

Wal-Mart literally behaves in almost every wayas if it were still Sam Walton’s curious experimentto see what happens if you cut costs, and cutprices, to the bare margins of survival. Wal-Martacts as if it is still a company with 30 stores, or300, instead of 3,000.

Wal-Mart is not greedy, Wal-Mart is notspendthrift, Wal-Mart is not complicated, Wal-Mart is not disingenuous. Walk into the stores—walk into headquarters—what you see is what youget. That is what is so frustrating for Wal-Mart’s“conflicted” customers, for Wal-Mart’s opponents,even for Wal-Mart’s leaders. How could a com-pany so modest, so unpretentious, so frugal, a

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company so driven, so tireless, so determined todrive a hard bargain be bad?

Because as odd as it may at first seem, Wal-Mart has literally outgrown those values. Scalematters—we know that intuitively—but it cansometimes be hard to remember that when sizechanges gradually.

It is one thing to have a few hundred storesclustered in the middle of the country, for whichyou furiously buy stuff as cheaply as possible, al-ways on watch for someone willing to make you adeal. It is quite another to have so much buyingpower that instead of simply scrounging for gooddeals or willing suppliers, you can literally reachinto the factories of your suppliers and determinehow they operate—or even where they operate.The reason the evolution is so confusing is thatthe fundamental operating principle—the deter-mination to deliver stuff cheap—doesn’t change.It’s even possible to grant that the motivation ofWal-Mart’s buyers doesn’t change. And the resultson the shelf don’t appear to change.

What changes is the scale. What changes is theintangible—the power, the impact that comeswith scale.

SqueezingPicklePrices

A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is somethingto behold. The jar itself is the size of a smallaquarium. The fat green pickles look reptilian,

their shapes exaggerated by the glass of the jar.The jar weighs twelve pounds, too big to carrywith one hand. Vlasic’s gallon jar of pickles is adisplay of abundance and excess, and Wal-Martfell in love with it, pricing it a $2.97. A year’ssupply of pickles cost less than $3! “They wereusing it as a ‘statement’ item,” says Pat Hunn, whocalls himself the mad scientist of the gallon jar ofpickles at Vlasic. “Wal-Mart was putting it beforeconsumers, saying this represents what Wal-Mart’sabout. You can buy a stinkin’ gallon of pickles for$2.97. And it’s the nation’s number-one brand.”

Because of Wal-Mart’s scale, the Wal-Mart ef-fect is not simply about delivering “always lowprices.” It is also about how Wal-Mart achievesthose low prices, and what impact the low priceshave far beyond Wal-Mart’s shelves, and beyondour own wallets—the cost of low prices to the

companies that supply Wal-Mart and to the peo-ple who work for those companies. That story canbe found floating in Vlasic’s gallon jar of pickles,the tale of how that gallon jar came to be sold atthat price at Wal-Mart.

Back in the late 1990s, Vlasic wasn’t looking tobuild its brand on a gallon of whole pickles. Picklecompanies make money on “the cut,” slicing cu-cumbers into specialty items like spears and ham-burger chips. “Cucumbers in the jar, you don’tmake a whole lot of money there,” says SteveYoung, who was then vice president of marketingfor pickles at Vlasic, but has since left the com-pany. But a Wal-Mart buyer saw the gallon jar atsome point in the late 1990s, and started talkingto Pat Hunn about it. Hunn, who has also sinceleft Vlasic, was then head of Vlasic’s Wal-Martsales team, based in Dallas.

The gallon intrigued the buyer. For Vlasic, itwas a niche product aimed at small businesses andpeople having large events. Still, in sales tests inWal-Mart stores, priced somewhere over $3, “thegallon sold like crazy,” says Hunn, “surprising usall.” The Wal-Mart pickle buyer had a brainstorm:What would happen to the gallon if they offered itnationwide, and got it below $3? Hunn was skep-tical, but his job was to look for ways to sell picklesat Wal-Mart. Why not?

And so in 1998, Vlasic’s gallon jar of pickleswent into every Wal-Mart, 2,500 stores, at $2.97,a price so low that Vlasic and Wal-Mart were onlymaking a penny or two on a jar, if that. The gallonwas showcased on a big, freestanding pallet displaynear the front of stores.

“They went through the roof,” says Hunn.Says Young, “It was selling eighty jars a week,

on average, in every store.” It doesn’t sound dra-matic until you add it up: 200,000 gallons ofpickles, just in gallon jars, just at Wal-Mart, everyweek. Whole fields of cucumbers were heading outthe door.

The gallon jar of pickles became what youmight call a “devastating success” for Vlasic.“Quickly, it started cannibalizing our non-Wal-Mart business,” says Young. “We saw consumerswho used to buy the spears and the chips insupermarkets”—where a small quart jar of Vlasic

2006 13Fishman

pickles cost $2.49—“buying the Wal-Mart gal-lons.”

The gallon jar reshaped Vlasic’s pickle busi-ness. It chewed up the profit margin of the busi-ness with Wal-Mart and of pickles generally; pro-curement had to scramble to find enough picklesto fill the gallons. The volume also gave Vlasicstrong sales numbers, strong growth numbers, anda powerful place in the world of pickles at Wal-Mart.

The gallon was hoisting Vlasic and hurting it atthe same time. Indeed, Steve Young, Vlasic’s mar-keting guy, and Pat Hunn, Vlasic’s Wal-Mart salesguy, agree on the details of the gallon, but yearslater they disagree over whether it was good or badfor Vlasic.

Hunn remembers cutting a deal with Wal-Martwhereby the retailer could only increase its sales ofgallons if it increased its sales of the more profit-able spears and chips in lockstep. The gallon wasgood.

Young remembers begging Wal-Mart for relief.“They said, ‘No way,’ ” says Young. “We said we’llincrease the price”—even $3.49 would havehelped tremendously—“and they said, ‘If you dothat, all the other products of yours we buy, we’llstop buying.’ It was a clear threat.”

Hunn remembers the conversations differently.Things were more complicated, more subtle.“They did not put a gun to our head and say, ‘It’s$2.97 or you’re out of here,’ ” says Hunn. “Theysaid, ‘We want the $2.97 gallon of pickles. If youdon’t do it, we’ll see if someone else might.’ I knewour competitors were saying to Wal-Mart, ‘We’lldo the $2.97 gallons if you give us your otherbusiness.’ ”

“We’re all big boys,” Hunn says. “We all makedecisions.”

Wal-Mart’s business was so indispensable toVlasic, and the gallon so central to the Wal-Martrelationship, that decisions about the future of thegallon were made at the CEO level. “One optionwas to call their bluff,” says Young. But Vlasic wasstruggling as an independent spin-off of CampbellSoup Company, and couldn’t afford to risk theWal-Mart business. The pain didn’t continue forweeks or months—the $2.97 gallon of Vlasic dills

was on the shelves at Wal-Mart for two and a halfyears.

Finally, Wal-Mart let Vlasic up for air. “TheWal-Mart guy’s response was classic,” says Young.“He said, ‘Well, we’ve done to pickles what we didto orange juice. We’ve killed it. We can backoff.’ ”

Vlasic got to take the product down to a half-gallon of pickles, for $2.49. By that point, Youngsays, profits in pickles had been cut by 50 per-cent—millions of dollars in lost profit, even as thebusiness itself grew. Devastating success, indeed.

The meaning of the Vlasic story is complicated,but it cuts to the heart of how Wal-Mart doesbusiness. Wal-Mart has 60,000 suppliers, and thestory of the gallon-jar of Vlasic pickles is perhapsextreme, but it is hardly unique. It shows theimpact of Wal-Mart’s scale and power in what weall think is a market economy. Wal-Mart’s focuson pricing, and its ability to hold a supplier’sbusiness hostage to its own agenda, distorts mar-kets in ways that consumers don’t see, and waysthe suppliers can’t effectively counter. Wal-Martis so large that it can often defy the laws of supply,demand, and competition.

That’s the scary part of the Vlasic story: Themarket didn’t create the $2.97 gallon of pickles,nor did waning consumer demand or a wild abun-dance of cucumbers. Wal-Mart created the $2.97gallon jar of pickles. The price—a number that isa critical piece of information to buyers, sellers,and competitors about the state of the picklemarket—the price was a lie. It was unrelated toeither the supply of cucumbers or the demand forpickles. The price was a fiction imposed on thepickle market in Bentonville. Consumers saw abargain; Vlasic saw no way out. Both were re-sponding not to real market forces, but to a pickleprice gimmick imposed by Wal-Mart as a way ofmaking a statement.

It’s easy, of course, to point out that Vlasicwalked into the gallon voluntarily, with years ofexperience doing business with Wal-Mart. But aproduct at a price isn’t some kind of unbreakablevow. Right after the gallon was pulled out of thestores, in January 2001, Vlasic filed for bank-ruptcy. And while the gallon jar of pickles wasn’tby any means the cause, Wal-Mart’s behavior dur-

14 AugustAcademy of Management Perspectives

ing Vlasic’s struggle certainly wasn’t that of a“partner” concerned about Vlasic’s financialhealth.

TheConsumer’sWallet

The Wal-Mart effect is dramatic not just inindividual shopping carts, of course, but acrossthe U.S. economy. Yet it is only in the last few

years that economists have been both willing andable to tackle some of the most basic questionsabout Wal-Mart’s economic impact: Does Wal-Mart lower prices, and by how much? Does theopening of a Wal-Mart employing hundreds ofpeople increase the total number of retail jobs inthe immediate community, or decrease it? DoesWal-Mart have an impact on wages in those com-munities? Does the arrival of a Wal-Mart putcompeting businesses out of business?

The first question to explore is: How muchdoes Wal-Mart save consumers every year? Let’sstart out simply, and just consider groceries, wherethe low estimate is that Wal-Mart saves its shop-pers 15 percent on a typical shopping cart of food.

In 2004, Wal-Mart shoppers spent $124 billionon groceries. That food, purchased at other super-markets, would have cost $146 billion. So Wal-Mart grocery shoppers alone saved $22 billion. Ifthe rest of the merchandise Wal-Mart sells is just5 percent cheaper than at competing stores, that’sanother $8 billion. So a conservative estimate isthat the people who shopped at Wal-Mart lastyear saved $30 billion. That’s the equivalent of a$270 Wal-Mart rebate check for every family inAmerica every year.

But no one shops “on average,” and the figureshave more immediacy, more power, at the level ofa family. Consider a family of two adults and twokids, with an annual income of $52,000. Thisfamily might easily spend $125 a week on grocer-ies, or $500 a month. If Wal-Mart comes to town,and they can save 15 percent on groceries, theysave $75 a month. That $75 adds up to $900 overthe course of a year—it’s the equivalent of anextra weekly pay check; it’s more than sevenweeks of free groceries. And that’s just for grocer-ies.

Given the volume of public acrimony aboutWal-Mart, it is possible to imagine that Wal-

Mart’s economic impact is well-settled. In fact,the debate grows noisier because few claims aboutWal-Mart’s economic impact—either good newsfrom Wal-Mart, or bad news from its critics—arebacked by solid economic research. Wal-Mart it-self bears a great deal of the blame for the uncer-tainty, because until the academic conference itsponsored last year, the company refused to coop-erate with even the most innocuous requests fordata and information from researchers.

Although what we now know for certain aboutthe Wal-Mart effect, thanks to a handful of par-ticularly determined researchers, is limited, it isfascinating, sometimes surprising, and often vi-tally important. A few of the most fundamentalquestions have been tackled, and the answers es-tablished. And each study suggests a fresh array ofurgent questions worth their own examination.

Wal-Mart lowers prices—and not just for peo-ple who shop at its stores, but even for people whoaggressively avoid Wal-Mart. Emek Basker, fromthe University of Missouri, looked at a tightlylimited selection of products sold by Wal-Mart,across a wide range of geography (165 cities) andtime (20 years). She found that Wal-Mart’s arrivallowers prices between 7 percent and 13 percentover the long-term, at least on the products whosepricing she analyzed, which ranged from shampooto cigarettes to Coke (Basker 2005).

Jerry Hausman of MIT and Ephraim Leibtag ofthe USDA studied the impact of Wal-Mart’s Su-percenters on grocery prices in the U.S. (Hausman& Leitbag 2005). Actually, the mission of Haus-man and Leibtag wasn’t to see how much lowergrocery prices are at Wal-Mart—other researchputs the range between 17 percent and 25 percent,depending on the city and the product mix (USBInvestment Research 2003). Instead, they set outto analyze how far off the official U.S. inflationrate for food might be, given that the monthlymethod for calculating the Consumer Price Indexsystematically ignores—or zeroes out—Wal-Mart’s impact on prices. They concluded thatgrocery price inflation for the years they studied(1998 through 2001) was overstated by 15 percentbecause the CPI ignores Wal-Mart. One grocerycompany’s pricing policies and market share are sodominant that they single-handedly lower the na-

2006 15Fishman

tional inflation rate for food. And the govern-ment’s price tracking method is so antiquated thatit can’t account for a singularly powerful anti-inflationary force. What’s more, it’s not just gro-ceries. Although Hausman and Leibtag only stud-ied Wal-Mart’s impact on grocery inflation, theCPI systematically ignores Wal-Mart’s direct im-pact on the pricing of all products. The entireU.S. inflation rate doesn’t know Wal-Mart exists.

In a second study (2005a), Hausman andLeibtag analyzed the ripples of Wal-Mart’s lowergrocery prices on competitors. Do people whoshop at other supermarkets, but avoid Wal-Mart,also get “Wal-Mart prices” as those stores lowerprices to remain competitive? The “indirect Wal-Mart effect” that Hausman and Leibtag measuredwas 5 percent—those who never enter a Wal-Mart Supercenter typically pay 5 percent less fortheir groceries if Wal-Mart is in their town. Thedollars involved for American shoppers are dra-matic, since the U.S. grocery bill is more than$750 billion a year. More tangibly, once Wal-Mart enters your town’s grocery market (the com-pany rolls out grocery sales one metro region at atime), Wal-Mart is buying your family nearlythree weeks of free groceries a year, even if younever set foot in a Wal-Mart store. The samecascading effect—the efficiencies and competitivepressure Wal-Mart imposes—lowers the prices ofall the routine household merchandise and ap-parel we buy, although the wider phenomenon hasnot yet been well-studied. (If it comes to 5 percentof all retail spending, Wal-Mart is saving consum-ers in excess of $150 billion a year—$1,500 forevery family in the U.S., whether they shop atWal-Mart or not.)

Employees’Paychecks

Wal-Mart earnestly portrays itself as family-friendly both inside and outside the com-pany. But in Bentonville, there is a well-

known role—the Wal-Mart wife. It’s just likebeing a military wife: she has to run her family asif her spouse were never coming home. In January2005, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott kicked off anaggressive nationwide campaign to correct whathe says are the misimpressions Americans have ofWal-Mart. Tackling wages, for instance, Scott has

said again and again, and with evident pride, thatthe average wage of hourly store employees is“almost twice the federal minimum wage.” But itisn’t clear that Scott has any idea what thatmeans. In Wal-Mart’s home state of Arkansas, thecompany says it pays store employees an average of$9.18 an hour. For a single mom with two kids,who opts to buy health insurance from Wal-Mart,that translates to take-home pay of $290 a week. Ifour single-mom Wal-Mart-associate is living in anapartment that costs only $500 a month, she’s gotjust $660 a month left for everything else: theelectric bill, car insurance, feeding and clothingher kids, saving for retirement. Even if she shopsat Wal-Mart, that’s lean living.

Wal-Mart has recently taken to explaining thatretail jobs like those it offers, although payingdouble the minimum wage, are nonetheless in-tended as supplemental income, not as support fora family. The problem with this scenario is that fortwo-thirds of Americans, Wal-Mart is the singlelargest employer in the state where they live. Andeven at $9 an hour, a year’s wages for a front-lineWal-Mart associate in a family of four totals belowthe 2006 federal poverty level of $20,000.

Less well understood, however, is that for itshourly employees, Wal-Mart’s total profit comesto $3 an hour over a typical year. So althoughthere may be some dispute about whether theaverage Wal-Mart store associate earns $8 an houror $9 an hour, Wal-Mart could not afford to paythose people $12 an hour. There isn’t enoughmoney—at least not without raising prices.

As complicated as it is to measure what Wal-Mart saves us, the costs Wal-Mart imposes, di-rectly and indirectly, are far more difficult to dis-entangle. One of the most basic and contentiousquestions is whether Wal-Mart creates jobs or,because of its own efficiency, ultimately destroysmore jobs than it creates. Separating out the im-pact of Wal-Mart on a local job market from theeffects of other events, like plant-closings, routinegrowth, and the larger impact of the nationaleconomy’s ups and downs is daunting. David Neu-mark, Junfu Zhang, and Stephen Ciccarella (allassociated with the Public Policy Institute of Cal-ifornia) set out to do just that, helped by a wealthof data from Wal-Mart itself, as part of the com-

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pany’s effort to be more open about its operations(Neumark, Zhang, & Ciccarella 2005).

The trio looked at Wal-Mart’s impact on em-ployment and wage levels over 19 years in 3,094counties (leaving out only Alaska and Hawaii).Their analysis included 2,211 Wal-Mart storesand Supercenters. And they seem almost reluctantabout their own conclusions. “On balance, theevidence is more consistent with the claims ofWal-Mart’s critics,” they write in a paper pre-sented at last fall’s Global Insight conferencesponsored by Wal-Mart itself, “although questionsremain.”

A typical Wal-Mart, they discover, after hav-ing been open about eight years, reduces retailemployment in its county by 2 to 4 percent. That’snot a correlation—the Wal-Mart store causes theoverall reduction in jobs. Wal-Mart also causesretail wages to fall “by about 3.5 percent,” theresearchers conclude, “but this conclusion is lessrobust.” The impact on wages goes beyond retail,however. “(T)here is stronger evidence that totalpayrolls per worker and per person decline, byabout two and five percent, respectively, implyingthat residents of a local labor market do indeedearn less following the opening of Wal-Martstores.” As with shopping, even if you don’t workfor Wal-Mart, you feel the ripples of the Wal-Marteffect in your paycheck. In the South, where Wal-Mart’s business is most robust and its presencemost extensive and long-standing, the evidencethat Wal-Mart reduces the number of jobs and thelevel of wages is “clear,” the trio conclude.

Neumark and his colleagues are careful to saythat they don’t understand the mechanism thatcauses the reduction in both employment andwages. And they immediately qualify their ownresults by pointing out the next layer of complex-ity: “The earnings declines associated with Wal-Mart do not necessarily imply that Wal-Martstores worsen the economic fortunes of residentsof the markets that these stores enter.” SinceWal-Mart also lowers prices dramatically, therebyincreasing purchasing power, it’s not clear howmuch of the reduction in jobs and wages is offsetby the reduction in prices.

Still, the research of Neumark, Zhang, andCiccarella is an important corrective to Wal-

Mart’s own constant promotion as a job-creationengine: 100,000 new jobs in the U.S. in 2004;125,000 new jobs in the U.S. in 2005. In fact,Wal-Mart creates new Wal-Mart jobs. But if Neu-mark’s exhaustive analysis of the data is correct, inthe process of creating 125,000 new jobs in theU.S. last year, Wal-Mart destroyed 127,500 jobs.

ConflictedConsumers

Wal-Mart’s decidedly mixed economic impactis reflected in the ambivalent feelings ofWal-Mart shoppers toward the largest store

in history. In the summer of 2003, researchers forone of the world’s largest advertising agencies,Foote Cone & Belding, went to Oklahoma City,Oklahoma, to try to better understand in a sys-tematic way who shopped at Wal-Mart, and why(Shapiro & Foote, Cone & Belding 2003).

They chose Oklahoma City because it lookedlike America demographically, and because it hadall four kinds of Wal-Mart stores (Supercenter,Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Neighborhood Market).The researchers studied a whole range of things:shopping habits, number of trips to various kindsof stores, how competition changed as Wal-Martgrew.

For those skeptical that Wal-Mart touches thelives of virtually every American every day, theresearch found Wal-Mart owned 27 percent of themarket for groceries in Oklahoma City, and that93 percent of Oklahoma City residents hadshopped at Wal-Mart in the previous year. Inwhatever stores the other 7 percent of residentswere shopping, they had surely reshaped their ownbusiness to compete with Wal-Mart.

Perhaps the most interesting thing the re-searchers did, though, was ask questions abouthow Oklahomans felt about Wal-Mart, dividingWal-Mart shoppers into something they calledattitudinal segments. They discovered four basickinds of Wal-Mart shoppers: champions, enthusi-asts, conflicted, and rejecters.

The champions, 29 percent of Oklahoma Cityshoppers, are Wal-Mart missionaries. They loveWal-mart; most weeks they visit the stores twice(7.3 times in four weeks), and they spend morethan $100 a week there ($402 in 4 weeks).

The conflicted shoppers—15 percent in Okla-

2006 17Fishman

homa City—actively dislike Wal-Mart because ofits impact on communities, wages, and jobs. Butby a wide margin, they are the second-most fre-quent shoppers at the store—they go more thanonce a week (5.6 times in a month), and theyspend nearly as much at Wal-Mart as the cham-pions—$289 a month.

Conflicted Wal-Mart shoppers spend threetimes as much money at Wal-Mart as those thestudy called enthusiasts, and they go to Wal-Martnearly six times as often. The conflicted folks, whowere “very Wal-Mart negative,” are in real dollarsmore enthusiastic shoppers than the enthusiasts.(Even the Wal-Mart rejecters shop at Wal-Martan average of nine times a year, and they spendmore than $450 a year.)

The Foote, Cone & Belding research, releasedin early 2004, got almost no attention. But itsuggests two remarkable, related insights. The firstis the depth of feeling Americans have about whatis, fundamentally, just a place to shop. The otherimportant point the research makes is that theWal-Mart effect is so powerful, the gravitationalforce the company exerts on us is so irresistible,that the second-most important group of custom-ers for Wal-Mart actively dislikes the place. We’vebecome so accustomed to a noisy public conflictabout Wal-Mart, that it may be easy to slide pastthe significance of this point. How many compa-nies can say that the amount of customers who usetheir services second most often, and spend thesecond most amount of money with them, are“very negative”?

Wal-Mart doesn’t just reshape the economicsof business, the dynamics of global manufacturing,the traffic patterns of American cities—Wal-Martreshapes our own behavior. Indeed, the OklahomaCity study found that 62 percent of people rou-tinely inconvenience themselves to shop at Wal-Mart.

So even within ourselves, we struggle unsuc-cessfully to answer the question we started with: IsWal-Mart good or bad? The answer is surprisingfor both its simplicity, its obviousness, and also forits power: It is neither.

Wal-Mart is something utterly new.Wal-Mart is carefully disguised as something

ordinary, familiar, even prosaic. The business

model is built on the shopping cart. But, in fact,Wal-Mart is a completely new kind of institution:modern, advanced, potent in ways we’ve neverseen before. Yes, Wal-Mart plays by the rules, butperhaps the most important part of the Wal-Marteffect is that the rules are antiquated; they arefrom a different era that didn’t anticipate anythinglike Wal-Mart. That is the source of the compa-ny’s sweeping ability to suffocate inflation acrossthe entire U.S. economy. And it is the source ofthe company’s ability single-handedly to drivemanufacturing jobs overseas.

Wal-Mart has outgrown the rules—but no onenoticed. At the moment, we are incapable as asociety of understanding Wal-Mart because wehaven’t equipped ourselves to manage it.

ANational Conversation

Before the invention of machines powered bygasoline engines, there was no need to deviserules governing the exhaust gases from cars.

But when there is one car for every two people inthe country (1975), you very definitely need emis-sion controls—they may in fact seem quite urgent.Yet between the time Ford started selling theModel T and the year catalytic converters werefirst required on cars, 67 years had passed.

The car—the car in America—is an instructivepoint of comparison to Wal-Mart. Is the car goodfor America? Absolutely. We love our cars—welove the freedom they have given us, the sense ofcontrol, the independence, the pleasure. Ofcourse, cars have also given us air pollution, sub-urban sprawl, mindless mobility, the homogeniza-tion of regional culture, higher taxes, reliance onoil from foreign countries, the obliteration of thenatural landscape, and violent death on an epicscale. Cars kill more than 40,000 Americans everyyear. But we do love our cars.

It took decades to understand and adjust to theimpact of the automobile—decades to appreciatethe opportunity, the costs, the nature of the forcesat work, and the scale. Putting the proper limitson cars—not just pollution and safety controls,but also speed limits, fuel economy, zoning, andhighway funding—has not been a quiet or easyprocess. It has been a series of battles, nationallyand locally, involving information, priorities,

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profits, power, and accusations of bad faith on allsides. The effort to put the proper limits on cars, infact, has often involved competing visions of whatkind of country America is, and what kind ofcountry it is going to be.

The national conversation about Wal-Mart is,in many ways, exactly the same kind of conversa-tion. It is a conversation about priorities, aboutvalues, about what kind of country this is andwhat kind of country it’s going to be. It is aconversation about power, and competing visionsof the future. Do we value cheap merchandisemore than good factory jobs? Do we value theconvenience of buying everything from eggs andeyeglasses to Levi’s and lawnmowers in a singleplace more than charming main streets with localshopkeepers? Do we value the freedom of a busi-ness to decide where and how to serve its custom-ers more than the responsibility of a local govern-ment to safeguard the shape and character of atown? In a democracy, do we want a single com-pany to have the reach and power that Wal-Marthas—a power that right now is accountable to noone?

On the other hand, what could be more dem-ocratic than a company that is literally built upfrom the choices made every day by ordinaryAmericans voting with their debit cards, com-pelled by nothing but their own choices. Do wevalue the “rules” of economic fair play as theyhappen to be written right now more than ourability to recognize and manage a totally new kindof economic power?

Why don’t we give Wal-Mart more credit fordoing exactly what it has promised—always lowprices? No company can claim greater fidelity toits core value—no company, in that sense, is moretruly trustworthy than Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart hasthe scale of the nineteenth-century trusts—Stan-dard Oil, U.S. Steel—but those companies accu-mulated power on behalf of themselves and theirexecutives and their priorities—ordinary people,and the rest of the country, be damned. That’swhy they weren’t permitted to survive. Wal-Martdoes exactly the opposite: It ostensibly accumu-lates power on behalf of us, the ordinary people.And it has been as steadfast, as reliable, in thatmission as AT&T was, for instance, in delivering

dial tone when you picked up the telephone. Ofcourse AT&T wasn’t permitted to survive either.

Wal-MartWatch

There has been a dramatic increase in publiccriticism, and public wariness, of Wal-Mart inthe last five years. Local fights over specific

Wal-Mart locations—the sites of stores, their size,the zoning—often have Wal-Mart opponentswho are as well prepared as Wal-Mart’s local at-torneys, opponents who have tapped into years ofexperience from activists in other communities.Nationally, a coalition of 50 groups, backed withmillions of dollars in funding from labor unionsand environmental groups, has created a Wash-ington-based group called Wal-Mart Watch,whose purpose is to call Wal-Mart’s business prac-tices into question, and to try to hold the com-pany accountable for the impact it has on theglobal economy—an impact Wal-Mart often in-sists it does not have, or has no control over.Wal-Mart Watch’s seriousness, as well as its ped-igree, is clear from the people on the board ofdirectors of its parent organization, who includethe executive director of the Sierra Club, thepresident of Common Cause, and the president ofthe Service Employees International Union(SEIU). Wal-Mart Watch’s executive director isthe former head of the Democratic SenatorialCampaign Committee.

Wal-Mart has acknowledged the rising level ofcriticism by launching a public relations campaignof its own. Critical stories in even small newspa-pers are often answered by letters to the editorfrom Wal-Mart officials; the company has an ag-gressive image advertising campaign featuring em-ployees talking about how good a place Wal-Marthas been to build a career and support a family.Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott does many more mediainterviews than any previous Wal-Mart chief, andhe has probably done more than all previous Wal-Mart CEOs combined. When Wal-Mart provedfar more effective at delivering supplies to victimsof Hurricane Katrina than the federal govern-ment—Wal-Mart’s business, of course, is deliver-ing supplies better than anyone in the world—thecompany went out of its way to accommodatereporters trying to tell that story. Wal-Mart

2006 19Fishman

launched a website called walmartfacts.com,which is rich in a cascade of numbers, if notcontext.

The real problem in this conversation, how-ever, is that we may need to change how we thinkabout Wal-Mart—and not just Wal-Mart, but byextension, a whole class of megacorporations ofwhich Wal-Mart is just the most extreme, vividexample. The easiest response to the Wal-Martcritics comes from people who shrug and say, theUnited States economy is capitalistic and market-based. Wal-Mart is large and ubiquitous—andpowerful—because it does what it does so well.Wal-Mart is winning for no other reason thanpersonal choice: Customers vote for Wal-Martwith their wallets; suppliers vote for Wal-Martwith their products. Any consumer, any busi-nessperson who doesn’t care for the way Wal-Martdoes business is free to buy and sell products some-where else.

The problem is that this free choice has be-come an illusion. The CEO of an instantly recog-nizable consumer products company whose prod-ucts are sold at Wal-Mart, in the course of a45-minute conversation in which he explainedwhy there was no possible way he could talk abouthis relationship with Wal-Mart, said, “They havekilled free-market capitalism in America.”

In many categories of products it sells, Wal-Mart is now 30 percent or more of the entiremarket. Wal-Mart sells more than 30 percent ofthe skincare and haircare products used in theUnited States and more than 30 percent of smallkitchen appliances, housewares, and toys sold inthe country. It sells 31 percent of the pet food usedin the United States, 37 percent of the fresh meat,45 percent of the office and school supplies boughtby consumers, and 24 percent of the bottled water.In the state of Texas, 25 percent of all groceriessold are bought at Wal-Mart.

That kind of dominance at both ends of thespectrum—dominance across a huge range ofmerchandise and dominance of geographic con-sumer markets—means that market capitalism isbeing strangled with the kind of slow inexorabilityof a boa constrictor. It’s not free-market capital-ism; Wal-Mart is running the market. Wal-Mart’ssuppliers can’t consider themselves serious play-

ers—in dog food or deodorant, in turkeys or tooth-paste—unless they are doing business with Wal-Mart. Once they are doing business with Wal-Mart, though, they are doing business on Wal-Mart’s terms because the company alreadydominates whatever business their suppliers are in.

This is true even among Wal-Mart’s megacor-poration partners. The newly merged Procter &Gamble and Gillette has sales in excess of $64billion a year—not only bigger by far than anyother consumer products company, but biggerthan all but 20 public companies of any kind inthe United States. But remember: Wal-Mart isn’tjust P&G’s number-one customer; Wal-Mart isbigger than P&G’s next nine customers combined.Cheerful discussions of partnerships notwith-standing, Wal-Mart owns P&G’s business. P&Gand Wal-Mart may in fact have a constructivepartnership—but it’s a partnership built out of ahealthy respect for the fact that P&G needs tokeep Wal-Mart happy. If the relationship shouldgo sour, it would be too bad for Wal-Mart. Itwould be devastating for P&G.

That’s why businesspeople are scared of Wal-Mart. They should be. And if a corporation withthe scale, vigor, and independence of P&G mustbend to Wal-Mart’s will, it’s easy to imagine thekind of influence Wal-Mart wields over the oper-ators of small factories in developing nations, fac-tories that just want work and have no leveragewith Wal-Mart or Wal-Mart’s vendors.

It can be hard to absorb exactly what kind ofadvantage scale now gives Wal-Mart, and whatkind of reach, speed, and opportunity for domi-nance. Wal-Mart didn’t have a single store outsidethe United States before November 1991. It hadonly two—in Mexico—when Sam Walton died inApril 1992.

Wal-Mart is now the largest corporate em-ployer in both Mexico and Canada. From doingno business at all in Mexico 15 years ago, Wal-Mart is now the nation’s largest retailer and thelargest grocer in the country—bigger than its nextthree competitors combined. Wal-Mart is thelargest retailer in Canada. Wal-Mart is the secondlargest grocer in England.

The fear of Wal-Mart among businesspeople,and the deference to Wal-Mart, is dramatically

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magnified by Wal-Mart’s way of doing business.Wal-Mart isn’t greedy for profit; Wal-Mart isn’tstrictly speaking, greedy for power. Wal-Mart isgreedy for control. Wal-Mart has created the mostelaborate, sophisticated ecosystem in the historyof business. The ecosystem isn’t a metaphor; it is areal place in the global economy where the verymetabolism of business is set by Wal-Mart. Thefear of Wal-Mart isn’t just the fear of losing a bigaccount. It’s the fear that the more business youdo with Wal-Mart, the deeper you end up insidethe Wal-Mart ecosystem, and the less you areactually running your own business.

Wal-Mart’s leadership virtually never acknowl-edges this control, but the company clearly under-stands it, and even takes a sly pride in it. Wal-Mart has mastered market capitalism brilliantly.Its obsessive focus on price, its unrelenting disci-pline of itself and its suppliers, has powered itsgrowth. Now Wal-Mart’s scale allows it to con-stantly and quickly extend the area it controlsdeeper into the factories and offices and decisionsof the chain of companies that feed it, across newlines of business, and across wider and wider ge-ographies. That is the Wal-Mart effect writ large:The expansion of the terrain in which businessmust follow Wal-Mart’s rules allows Wal-Mart tocontinue to grow. The growth feeds the ecosys-tem, and the ecosystem powers the growth.

And that is the sense in which Wal-Mart is outof control. It is actually in complete control—ofitself, its surroundings, its suppliers, the very busi-ness climate in which it operates every day. As anew kind of megacorporation of a scale of eco-nomic power we haven’t encountered before,Wal-Mart is out of the control of something muchmore important than wage-and-hour or child-la-bor laws. Wal-Mart is increasingly beyond thecontrol of the market forces that capitalism relieson to enforce fair play. Wal-Mart isn’t subject tothe market forces because it is creating them.

TheMega-InformationGap

What Wal-Mart’s size, power, and secrecymake clear is how antiquated, and how triv-ial, is the quantity of information we require

from public companies. The problem has crept up

on us as the size and dominance of corporationshas crept up.

Wal-Mart is now so big that it’s possible to aska whole set of questions that would have beenirrelevant, if not downright silly, 20 years ago. Forexample, what is the impact of Wal-Mart’s wagesnot on its own workers, but on the wages in anentire town, or in an entire industry? What isWal-Mart’s impact on the variety and availabilityof consumer goods? What is Wal-Mart’s directimpact on sending U.S. manufacturing jobs over-seas? What is the impact on local economies ofWal-Mart’s abandoning old stores? What is theimpact of Wal-Mart—and its suppliers—on theenvironment?

These are important questions—they are im-portant precisely because of Wal-Mart’s scale—and the answers would be complicated and hugelyrevealing. The answers would also be contentiousand controversial. But as a country, we have theright, the power, and indeed the responsibility toask them. Yet, we aren’t even close to gettinganswers to even these most basic questions aboutWal-Mart because the company’s secrecy snuffsout most serious academic and economic inquiry,and because the rules about what informationshould be public have so seriously lagged the so-phistication of the corporations themselves.

Consider the example of Wal-Mart and healthinsurance. Even meaningful information has beendifficult to get. Before improving its offerings inspring 2006, Wal-Mart, for instance, would toutthat it made health insurance available to bothfull-time and part-time employees, and insistedthat premiums were affordable. But Wal-Mart didnot say that part-time employees—those workingfewer than 34 hours a week—had to work for twoyears before becoming eligible to buy insurance, orthat even after two years, part-time employeescould not buy insurance for their families, only forthemselves. Wal-Mart’s insurance may or may notbe “affordable,” but until 2005 it did not evencover some basic things, like the cost of vaccina-tions for routine childhood diseases. (In spring2006, the company cut the waiting period forpart-time employees to a year—and now allowspart-timers to buy insurance for family members.)

Even as Wal-Mart had begun using its health

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insurance benefits as a public image tool, high-lighted in the company’s newspaper ads, its TVspots, and Lee Scott’s speeches, a series of embar-rassing stories showed that tens of thousands ofWal-Mart employees, or their family members,actually get their health insurance from Medicaid,or from state government insurance programs forthe poor.

Perhaps the most dramatic was the revelationthat in Georgia, 10,261 children enrolled in thestate’s insurance program for poor children had aparent who worked at Wal-Mart. The employerwith the next highest number of children was alsoa retailer, Publix Super Markets: 734 children inthe Georgia program had a parent who worked atPublix. Even accounting for Wal-Mart’s scale, thefigure was stunning. Wal-Mart had one child inGeorgia’s kids’ insurance program for every fourWal-Mart employees in Georgia. Publix had onechild in the program for every 22 employees in thestate. In Tennessee, 9,617 Wal-Mart employeeswere on the state’s health insurance program forlow-income people.

Wal-Mart has seemed at a particular loss onhow to handle the health insurance question. In apresentation to reporters in Bentonville in April2005, CEO Lee Scott, in answer to a question,said, “There are government assistance programsout there that are so lucrative, it’s hard to becompetitive, and it’s expensive to be competi-tive.” That would be the CEO of the most pow-erful company in history arguing that his compa-ny’s insurance program can’t compete with theinsurance offered to poor people by the state ofTennessee.

Just trying to understand one company’s impacton government health care costs shows how chal-lenging getting information about important pub-lic policy questions can be.

Historically, of course, our ability to see a prob-lem, to understand it, then to determine how tomanage it necessarily lags behind the problemitself. When factories proved to be infernal, dan-gerous places to work, we put rules in place abouthours and safety. When the developers of citiesproved unable to organize their efforts reasonably,we put rules in place about zoning. When itturned out that the airline business—precisely be-

cause of competition—couldn’t be trusted to cre-ate safer flying all the time, we imposed an actualtechnocracy that regulates everything about thesafety of civilian jetliners, from minimum mainte-nance schedules, to onboard staffing, to the ma-terials used in seat upholstery. When the carmak-ers proved unwilling to make cars more efficient,we imposed fuel efficiency standards.

Initial objections notwithstanding, most effortslike this end up being beneficial not just for thepeople with immediate problems, but for the peo-ple on whom the rules are imposed. Safer factoriesare hugely more efficient and less costly. Zoningquickly made property of all kinds more valuable.The airline business today suffers from all kinds ofproblems, but it rightly brags about its safety,which has been critical to enabling the industry tocontinue to flourish. The most dangerous part ofthe plane trip, as we all hear routinely, is the rideto the airport in the car. In a world with $70 abarrel oil, we all benefit from even the modest fueleconomy standards imposed by Congress—the carmanufacturers most of all.

In that sense, Wal-Mart is a problem, but it’salso an opportunity.

The five biggest public companies in theUnited States—with sales of $1.1 trillion—ac-count for 9 percent of the economy. The top 20companies account for 20 percent of the economy.Those numbers are arresting, and they are movingin the direction of increased concentration. Tenand 20 years ago, you had to add up the sales ofthe top 30 Fortune 500 companies before theyaccounted for 20 percent of the economy. Fiftyyears ago, in 1954, not even the total sales of thetop 60 companies in the country equaled 20 per-cent of the economy. We don’t often talk aboutthe concentration of corporate power, but it isalmost unfathomable that the men and womenwho run just 20 companies make decisions everyday that steer one-fifth of the U.S. economy. (TheUnited States has 7,500 publicly traded compa-nies and more than five million companies of allkinds.)

Wal-Mart makes the lack of accountability, ofcontrol, even of information, vivid. But Wal-Martis just a symbol of the era of the modern mega-corporation, and we have been living in that era

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for perhaps 50 years. We don’t properly under-stand the impact of a whole tier of companies—ExxonMobil, AOL Time Warner, GM, GE, Veri-zon, IBM, Dell, P&G, Southwest Airlines—whoseoperations are so large, and so dominant in certainindustries or certain geographies, that like Wal-Mart they stand astride the market forces we relyon to harness them.

The information gap about megacorporations isoften stunning, and we’ve become oddly accli-mated to it. Wal-Mart is the largest corporateemployer in the United States, with 1.2 millionU.S. employees. Wal-Mart, as it happens, is alsothe largest corporate employer in two dozen of the50 states. That doesn’t necessarily follow: Therecould be a variety of number-one and number-twoemployers across the country, different from stateto state, and Wal-Mart, coming in, say, as numberthree in almost every state, could still be thelargest in the nation. But as it happens, in at least16 states, and likely 24, Wal-Mart is the number-one employer.

Ironically, the exact number of states in whichWal-Mart is the number one employer is all butimpossible to determine. In literally weeks of re-search, it has been impossible to determine becausestates, at the behest of corporations, won’t tell you.Wal-Mart, to its credit (and as a way of showing howmuch it gives back to communities through jobs),posts figures on its walmartfacts.com website show-ing the number of full- and part-time employees inevery state, updated every three months. In a fewstates, government officials happily supply a list ofthe largest employers, public and private. In at leastanother 15, government officials say that the list ofthe largest employers cannot be released because itis not public information. In what sense, exactly,are the names of the largest companies in a state,and the number of people they employ, not “pub-lic”? What could possibly be a more fundamentalplace to start understanding impact than a simplemeasure of size?

Lifting theVeil

It’s time to do two things: To acknowledge inpublic policy terms that there is a differencebetween a $10 million corporation, a $100 mil-

lion corporation, and a $100 billion corporation.

We need to acknowledge that scale matters. Andwe need to start a fresh process of understandingby insisting on a level of information from mega-corporations that they will vigorously resist pro-viding. As with other shifts in corporate account-ability, we can be absolutely confident that assoon as the new era of megacorporation transpar-ency is in place, not only will we benefit, but alsothe companies themselves will benefit. Indeed, inan era when companies relentlessly gather andanalyze data about us—all for our own benefit, ofcourse, and Wal-Mart no less than others—it is farpast time for those companies to provide far moredata to us about themselves.

From what kinds of companies would we de-mand more information, and what level of infor-mation? That’s a public policy question, an urgentone that is not even on anyone’s agenda. Thesimple, perhaps simplistic, answer is that a mega-corporation is one that is so large—either in termsof sales, or dominance of a certain market, orcontrol of a certain market within a defined ge-ography, or in terms of employment—that it hasthe power to reshape that market. What is clear isthat companies should not be allowed to decidewhat information they should release—anymorethan they should be allowed to determine thesafety regulations of their factories, or the pollu-tion rules under which their cars operate. To seethat, one need to look no further than the stun-ning collapse and fraud around Enron and World-com—publicly traded companies whose public re-lease of information wasn’t quite detailed enoughto show that they were essentially criminal enter-prises.

Resistance from companies will be fierce, notsimply because the corporate reflex has alwaysbeen for a protective secrecy. Companies will fear,rightly, that once fresh cascades of informationcome out about their impact, there will be amovement to hold them accountable for thoseimpacts—either from public pressure, or from reg-ulation.

Minnesota legislators in 2005, curious aboutwhether the employees and family members ofWal-Mart and other large employers use thestate’s public assistance programs, discovered thatMinnesota state agencies don’t gather that data. A

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bill introduced that would create such a list wasvigorously, even angrily, opposed by Wal-Mart,which sent two officials to St. Paul to lobbyagainst it, and sent each legislator a two-pageletter outlining its opposition to the law. Theletter said the new Minnesota law—similar tolaws being drafted now in dozens of states—wouldn’t “provide health insurance to anyone,”and was simply “a misguided, destructive assaulton a business trying to create 100,000 new jobsthis year.”

A Minnesota state representative supportingthe law, Sheldon Johnson, said, “If it’s true whatpeople say, that big multinational companies areoutsourcing health care to taxpayers, then itwould be good to have a handle on which ones.It’s just information.”

It’s just information. The scale of the resistancefrom companies to revealing more about the sizeand impact of their operations can be gauged fromthis one example: The Minnesota law Wal-Marthas worked hard against wouldn’t create theslightest burden of any kind on Wal-Mart, or onany Wal-Mart staff in Bentonville. It would onlycreate work for Minnesota’s state governmentworkers and, perhaps ultimately, for Wal-Mart’spublic relations staff.

In the last year, Wal-Mart’s leadership seems tohave awoken to the realization that secrecy isn’tserving a company that is so large, and so deeplyentangled in public policy debates involving ev-erything from zoning to health care and outsourc-ing. Fitfully, Wal-Mart is trying to develop a moreconstructive, open working relationship with ac-ademics, regulators, and reporters. More signifi-cantly, Wal-Mart has started to talk about takingseriously the collateral impacts of its way of doingbusiness, and to look for ways to lessen thoseimpacts. The company has announced its deter-mination to double the gas mileage of its truckfleet; it has said it will buy shrimp only fromshrimp farms that follow a rigorous set of environ-mental standards, as certified by a third party; ithas doubled the number of certified organic prod-ucts it stocks in its stores—from 200 to 400. Thecynicism and skepticism with which the an-nouncements have been greeted are well-earned.The question is whether the changes are cosmetic,

merely “positioning” to quiet the criticism, orwhether they are fundamental, as Lee Scott says.Because for Wal-Mart to really start taking ac-count of its impact, it will have to change themission at the very core of its identity: It will haveto be something in addition to “always low prices.”That kind of cultural transformation would allowWal-Mart to change the world, again. But it willrequire Wal-Mart to re-imagine itself, and how itdoes business.

In his letter to Americans, printed in 100 news-papers in January 2005, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scottwrote, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinionsabout our company, but they are not entitled tomake up their own facts.” Of course, it is theultimate irony to be scolded for “making up facts”by a company that has historically made secrecyan integral part of its corporate culture. At aspeech to a Los Angeles business group a monthafter the open letter, Scott said, “The question ofhow to assure that American capitalism creates adecent society is one that will engage all of us inthe era ahead. To argue, as our critics do, that thisquest is somehow served by denying Americansthe higher living standards that Wal-Mart’s busi-ness efficiencies can bring is to make a mockery ofAmerican ideals under the guise of pursuingthem.”

Of course, by extension, to argue that the ques-tion of how to assure that American capitalismcreates a decent society can be debated and an-swered in the absence of information and under-standing of Wal-Mart’s impact is also to make amockery of American ideals, and of the very prin-ciples on which both a market economy, and ademocracy, are built. Wal-Mart is a creation of usand our money. The Wal-Mart effect derives allits vast power from us and our spending. At onelevel, Wal-Mart is the ultimate form of democra-cy—we vote yes each time we buy something, andthe vote is recorded in the vast database thatWal-Mart is constantly poring over to better un-derstand what will make us buy more. But we voteyes with imperfect information—without under-standing for what we are voting, when we vote forlow prices.

Later in the same speech in Los Angeles, Scottsaid, “Our critics seem to have a broader and, I

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believe, more troubling aim: to warp the vitaldebate the country needs in the years ahead aboutthe proper role of business and government inassuring that capitalism creates a decent society.”

The most certain way to avoid a warped debate,of course, is to have at hand for everyone a wealthof data, of information, of analysis. Markets, mar-ket economies, democracies, even specific indus-tries like the world of retailing all require infor-mation to work, and they work better andbetter—for everyone—the more information theyhave.

Wal-Mart is not just a store, or a company, ora powerful institution. It is also a mirror. Wal-Mart is quintessentially American. It mirrors ourown energy, our sense of destiny, our appetite forbigness and variety and innovation. And Wal-Mart is not just a reflection of American societyand values. It is a mirror of us as individuals. In ademocracy, our individual ambivalence aboutsuch a concentration of economic power, evenwhen that power is ostensibly on our side, is asignal. Both as individuals, and as a society, wehave an obligation to answer the unansweredquestions about Wal-Mart. Otherwise we havesurrendered control—of our communities, of our

economy, of some measure of our destiny—to de-cisions made in Bentonville.

References

Basker, E. 2005. Selling a cheaper mousetrap: Wal-Mart’seffect on retail prices, Journal of Urban Economics, 58:2(September 2005), pp. 203–229.

Hausman, J. & Leibtag, E. 2005. CPI bias from supercenters:Does the BLS know that Wal-Mart exists? NationalBureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No.10712, August 2004 (revised June 2005).

Hausman, J. & Leibtag, E. 2005a. Consumer benefits fromincreased competition in shopping outlets: measuringthe effect of Wal-Mart. National Bureau of EconomicResearch, Working Paper No. 11809, December 2005.

UBS Investment Research. 2003. Price gap widens, compe-tition looks hot hot hot. Cited in J. Hausman and E.Leibtag, CPI bias from supercenters: Does the BLS knowthat Wal-Mart exists? National Bureau of EconomicResearch, Working Paper No. 10712, August 2004 (re-vised June 2005).

Neumark, D., Zhang, J., & Ciccarella, S. 2005. The effectsof Wal-Mart on local labor markets. National Bureau ofEconomic Research Working Paper No. 11782, Novem-ber 2005.

Shapiro, L. J., & Foote, Cone & Belding (Chicago). July2003. Wal-Mart in Oklahoma: market structure andsegmentation study. Presented at Chicago AmericanMarketing Association BrandSmart 2004 Conference,March 2004.

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