Made In America: My Story<\/i> by Sam Walton.<\/p>\n
This one was on the list of Recommended Books for the Motley Fool’s Hidden Gems subscribers. <\/p>\n
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that this book has got a lot of “Aw Shucks” propaganda in it. Sam Walton claims he’s just trying to be a successful merchant by giving the customer what they want. He freely admits that he stole most of his best ideas from other retailers. The man brazenly walks into competitor’s stores with a tape recorder and a yellow legal pad and grills the workers on the floor about how they do things and how things are selling, taking notes all the while. He only mentions being caught once.<\/p>\n
I’ll never know if he really believes all this stuff about doing right by his “associates” or not.<\/p>\n
Two sides of the Wal-Mart debate are summed up by alternet<\/a> and the Fool<\/a>.<\/p>\n I came away from this book thinking that this is just a guy who is obsessed with the game of retail, and he was “good” at it. At the end of the book, I even detected a bit of nagging worry about what the legacy of Wal-Mart was going to be.<\/p>\n A lot of folks have criticized Wal-Mart for not giving back to the communities they are involved in. Sam’s response to this is that it is not the business of business to contribute to communities (“The business of business is business”, as the saying goes). His brand of contribution is to provide cheap pricing so that people can keep their money and use it to better their communities themselves. While one can argue (successfully, I’ll wager) that Wal-Mart hurts more than it helps in this regard (the low wages injected into the community and tax benefits Wal-Mart gets from local government offset the benefits of lower prices), the basic point he makes is worth considering: Why should a business be a force of charity? Should they not just lower prices and let people decide what parts of the community they wish to support with the savings?<\/p>\n At any rate, after reading how this organization works, I have a better idea why the Wal-Mart account reps in our company always have a worried look on their face.<\/p>\n And I also know I’m going to keep going to Kroger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Made In America: My Story by Sam Walton. This one was on the list of Recommended Books for the Motley Fool’s Hidden Gems subscribers. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that this book has got a lot of “Aw Shucks” propaganda in it. … Continue reading