Alice Pitman

Shopping’s Behemoth

The Wal-Mart Effect

By

Allen Lane / Penguin Press 294pp £12.99 order from our bookshop

Every week, more than one hundred million Americans shop at Wal-Mart (93 per cent of the population every year), and 138 million visit its stores worldwide each week. Since their takeover of Asda, they have become, worryingly, the second largest retailer over here. Not bad going for a business that started life as a small bargain store in a remote corner of Arkansas in 1962.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    Follow Us