‘The Wal-Mart effect is… never neutral,’ declares Charles Fishman in his opening chapter. Yet his book seems initially to be strangely ambivalent. There is a homespun cosiness to the opening chapters where former employees and suppliers reminisce about the old days, when unpretentious executives used ex-display deckchairs as their office furniture. But it soon becomes clear that Fishman is using these stories to explain not just Wal-Mart’s success, but its failure to react to global issues and opinion.
Fishman sometimes struggles to assess the company even-handedly – understandable, really, when giants like IBM and Procter & Gamble are too terrified to comment on the record; but there are some brilliantly telling soundbites. Of working conditions in Wal-Mart’s Bangladeshi garment factories, Fishman comments:
‘It is possible that Wal-Mart’s customers were buying pants off the display racks that might literally have been used to beat the people who made them.’ Fishman’s conclusion – that Wal-Mart has outgrown the laws and market forces that should govern it – and call for new legislation to limit its unprecedented power are timely and correct.
|
|
|
|
The best of London in your inbox
|
|
