Customer Reviews

The Wal-Mart Triumph: Inside the World's #1 Company

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Wal-Mart has become a controversial company because it has grown immensely powerful - by revenue the biggest company in the world and the largest private employer. From its origins as a southern mid-western company going for neglected rural markets, its story is one of remarkable success.

This book offers a succinct history and some explanation of how Wal-Mart succeeded: it went to markets that its big competitors ignored, made everyday low prices an essential part of its brand image, cultivated a conscientious service mentality in workers, and pursued efficiency through both scale and operations. That is its business model in a nutshell. Slater presents this matter of factly, as a natural evolution that carried the seeds of genius in the personality of earthy founder Sam Walton. The bulk of the story is how Walton's successors expanded the company far beyond what the founder achieved, making it truly global and putting a bureaucratic system into place. This was a bit useful for me as I start to investigate the company for a writing project.

Unfortunately, this book felt to me like Slater was happy to propogate the myth that Wal-Mart wishes observers to believe about the company. He recounts how employees are taught to cheerlead, and acts like they want to, like they feel it sincerely rather than do it because they have to! I can say that I found it hard to believe: big companies are rarely happy and enthusiastic places. Is that conclusion surprising to anyone? It would be for Slater, who himself is a cheerleader.

Even worse, he only perfunctorily asks himself any of the hard questions - such as the company's treatment of labor, its transforming impact on local communities, its use of sweatshops, etc. etc. - and then quickly implies that they are largely superfluous or silly exaggerations. This is nothing short of a simple white wash, and reads like PR that is trying to pose as thoughtful. This is really mediocre and shallow, almost like a company brochure. Slater failed to get inside the company, though he did do some interviews with prepped top officials, or so it appeared to me.

Oddly, as a relatively conservative business writer, I would give Wal-Mart the benefit of the doubt, pending my own investigation as a reporter. But Slater seems to be openly endorsing the company as if it lived up to its own PR. It is appalling to me, and I am no leftie or automatic critic of big companies, but I am a skeptic as a reporter.

Indeed, where he did address issues, they were never detailed enough, but instead were the most simplistic and narrow-minded generalizations. For example, he writes: "A new attitude was beginning to surface...Rather than show disdain for the negativism, the feeling was growing that there was virtue in having the media and community activists monitoring Wal-Mart." That pap is emblematic of the tone of this book and perfectly reflects how superficial it is. It also flatly contradicts what I have heard through the corporate grapevine with only the most simple of inquiries among my contacts.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this book. Reading it is like getting a huge vanilla milkshake for dinner rather than a steak. I will have to look elsewhere for more balanced treatments of the many thorny issues that this huge company has helped to create.

Okay so here goes.
Hey i just finished reading this book and it was amazing!
"The Wal-Mart Triumph" by Robert Slater was an amazing book. It's so soaked with facts on how and why Wal-Mart is the way it is if it had anymore facts the book would drown in a puddle of facts. The first chapter is basically about how Wal-Mart started and how Sam Walton started his business empire. Then it goes on to tell about how Walmart got it's roots implanted into the south and then took over certain chain stores in the south and so on and so forth unti they get to today and it talks about the lawsuits and so on and so forth.
Great book good read.

Very interesting book! I also liked the book, which is similar to this, "The Wal-Mart Way" which describes the man who had a clear purpose and vision and his greatness of achieving success in forming the World's #1 company.