Guardian UK: Wal-Mart, the US retailer taking over the world by stealth

[marmar]

Wal-Mart, the US retailer taking over the world by stealth
It has beefed up its green credentials, but Wal-Mart's stance on unions and sheer global scale still provoke as much fear as admiration

Andrew Clark in Bentonville, Arkansas
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 January 2010 15.31 GMT


It hardly shrieks of billion-dollar glamour. The US nerve centre of the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart, consists of a collection of low-slung prefabricated buildings along a four-lane highway in north-western Arkansas. Wal-Mart's head office is hundreds of miles from the nearest big city. It isn't even handy for the state capital, Little Rock, which is three and half hours' drive away.

But hopeful merchants beat a path from all corners of the world to hawk their wares here, in a series of bare Perspex rooms along a "supplier corridor". Staff work in spartan cubicles and reminders of the retailer's low-cost culture are constant – in an employee lounge an honesty box invites payment for tea and coffee with a blunt message: "Drinks are not free."

It was nearby, in the main square of the modest town of Bentonville, that Wal-Mart's founder, Sam Walton, opened a discount store, Walton's Five and Dime, in 1951. That shop, now a museum, helped spawn a retail empire that spans 8,100 stores in 15 countries generating $401bn (£248bn) of revenue annually. With a market capitalisation of $210bn, Wal-Mart is worth as much as the gross domestic product of Nigeria.

Four of America's 10 richest individuals are from Wal-Mart's low-profile Walton family, which still owns a 40% controlling stake. The company's portfolio ranges from superstores in the US to neighbourhood markets in Brazil, bodegas in Mexico, the Asda supermarket chain in Britain and Japan's nationwide network of Seiyu shops. Wal-Mart gets many of its products from low-cost Chinese suppliers. The pressure group China Labour Watch estimates that if it were a country, Wal-Mart would rank as China's seventh largest trading partner, just ahead of the UK, spending more than $18bn annually on Chinese goods. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jan/12/walmart-companies-to-shape-the-decade

[Sukie]

1. And I was worried about

our becoming the United States of Walmart.

[NoNothing]

2. Buy 'n' Large

"Happiness is what we sell,
That's why everyone loves BnL!"

[no_hypocrisy]

3. I never considered it "stealth". Walmart has been pretty up front as far as its world ambitions.

[prairierose]

4. After what happened in Germany, I think they adopted a more...

low key face as they move to other countries. They did not do the research on German labor and cultural attitudes and getting out of there cost them a pretty penny.

[HipChick]

5. the Asda's in the UK seem to be better than the Walmart's in the US