The Wal-Mart Effect takes us up the shopping aisles and into the amazing and alarming world of the most successful superstore in history. Charles Fishman has gained unprecedented access to this notoriously secretive business to expose the shocking extent of its influence on what we buy and how we live. Interviewing high-level ex-executives, travelling among suppliers (from purveyors of toothpaste to pickled gherkins) and uncovering the places where its influence is felt on fields and forests, he brings us the hidden voices from Planet Wal-Mart. Exploring every aspect of this consumer monolith, he shows that its silent power is now so great it can determine everything from the design of deodorant available in the US to what the lives of farm-raised chickens will be like and the hours Chinese bicycle-makers must work.
