Giving them the business

The United States of Wal-Mart, by John Dicker (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 245 pp., $12.95)

The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company, by Don Soderquist (Nelson Business, 240 pp., $24.99)

THERE'S no more perfect person than I to write this review. I have shopped at Wal-Mart precisely twice, in Pennsylvania and in New Hampshire, and each time I was most impressed by its everyday low prices. But I can't say that, living as I do here in unWal-Marted, West Village Manhattan, I miss it. Put bluntly, I just don't care very much either way about Wal-Mart. So, when confronted by these two books-which take diametrically opposed positions on the Beast of Bentonville--I like to think that my judgment will be not just Solonic in its brilliant and masterful vigor, but Solomonic in its sheer disinterestedness.

Let us turn to the books under review. Each is a perfect specimen of a certain genre of literature, with all the pros and cons that entails. John Dicker's The United States of Wal-Mart is a classic anticorporate tract. So, on the front, we have a cartoon illustration, provided by that nice Ted Rall, of a bug-eyed Statue of Liberty clothed in a Wal-Mart-issued blue vest. On the back, there's a photo of Dicker, an earnest young man in a striped sweater who looks like the new social-studies teacher at a Midwestern high school. His bio tells us that "his work has been published in The Nation, Salon, and numerous alternative newsweeklies." Of course it has.

Dicker really hates Wal-Mart and everything it stands for, but replace "Wal-Mart" with Bechtel (remember them, back in the '80s?), Exxon, Starbucks, The Gap, McDonald's, Union Carbide, Nike, Monsanto, Halliburton, Philip Morris, the Carlyle Group, etc., and you'll find the arguments very, very familiar. That's not to say some of the criticism isn't true or deserved, it's just that it's kind of old.

Consequently, we hear the usual atrocity stories about evil union-busters, lack of health-care benefits, the refusal to pay a "livable wage," overseas sweatshop labor, the destruction of independent businesses, and so forth, all backed up with research culled from a quickie Lexis-Nexis search or derived from sympathetic sources. Thus, on page 223 alone, we find footnotes citing The Nation, Liza Featherstone's book Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart, the Colorado Springs Independent (one of the alternative weeklies for which Dicker has written), an interview with a union leader, and Socialist Worker Online. Unfortunately, Dicker doesn't appear to have talked to anyone actually working at Wal-Mart who's not already on his side.

The guy he should have talked to is Don Soderquist. He's the former vice chairman and chief operating officer of Wal-Mart, and you can tell. In his cover shot, he looks exactly what you would expect a Wal-Mart senior executive to look like, what with his conservatively trimmed gray hair and generic suburban-white-guy appearance. Soderquist is wearing a plain, white, buttoned-down, precisely ironed shirt, dark trousers, and a tightly knotted colorful-but-not-crazy-colorful (white, navy, burgundy, gray) tie designed to set off, yet complement, the rest of the pointedly bland, inoffensive look. No jacket, interestingly: These Big Biz guys have avoided the 1950s Corporation Man outfit ever since a jacketless Lee Iacocca was snapped for the cover of his bestselling autobiography. Since Iacocca's day, though, judging by recent book photos, America's supremos have also decided to abstain from wearing cufflinks--either because French cuffs detract from their self-image as Determined Innovators or because they come across as too swish in the red states. Soderquist, accordingly, has rolled his single-cuffed sleeves to the mid-forearm, amply demonstrating Wal-Mart's get-the-job-done approach to corporate leadership. Clipped to his breast pocket is a Wal-Mart I.D. card with "Don" modestly printed on it. He's just one of the guys.

The Wal-Mart Way is an exemplar of The Business Book, that all-American amalgam of folksy self-help advice, secularized Christian principles, and meaningless pap aimed at convincing you, Mr. Assistant Regional Marketing Coordinator, that you too are a titan in the making. These books have one common characteristic: Like Soderquist, they don't really say anything (even as Dicker & Co. say the same thing, over and over again). So there's lots of abstract talk about "vision," "the execution imperative," "making a commitment to help your customers succeed," and "achieving excellence," and there are suitably uplifting quotes from people like Benjamin Disraeli (a one-nation Tory I suspect would not be pleased with the Wal-Mart Way), Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Johnny Carson, and the like--but none of this is converted into describing the absolutely single-minded and fanatical ruthlessness with which Wal-Mart proceeds on its way to dominate the world and wedgie its competitors. Having ploughed through 200-odd pages of Soderquist's prose, I remain unaware of what exactly the Wal-Mart Way is, though it seems to have something to do with "improving the lifestyle of ordinary Americans" by being "the agent for the customer" and keeping prices "as low as we can" while adhering to Sam Walton's small-town principles.