Wal-ways
The Wal-Mart You Don't KnowWal-Mart is not just the world's largest retailer. It's the world's largest company--bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. 'Clearly,' says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University's J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, 'Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been.' It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.
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Last year, 7.5 cents of every dollar spent in any store in the United States (other than auto-parts stores) went to the retailer.
Zowie.
Bill Moyers just did a
show on Wal-Mart's insidious, nefarious, unpatriotic... shenanigans, too. Fun facts and figures on the website.
What would be better, outlawing department stores or stipulating a 1000-mile radius between any two Wal-Marts?
* Ray, 12/23/2003 02:37:23 PM
