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On September 2, Horizon Institute and the UCLA Labor Center were proud to host Nelson Lichtenstein, author of The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business at the Labor Center’s downtown facilities. Local students and teachers, philanthropists, labor leaders and entrepreneurs came together to hear Dr. Lichtenstein share his extensive knowledge and analysis of how the retail juggernaut has reshaped the financial landscape.

Lichtenstein discussed how Wal-Mart has, at once, been a force for innovation and a drag on social and economic change. He described how Wal-Mart has utilized new technologies and efficiencies to track consumer spending patterns to an unprecedented degree (thus giving a retail operation enormous power to shape the manufacturing practices of those firms from which it buys) as well as to centralize and rationalize product delivery. Wal-Mart has also been ruthless in suppressing all attempts by its workers to unionize and negotiate for higher wages and safer, more humane working conditions. Furthermore, Wal-Mart has, for much of its history, tended to track men, over women, into supervisory roles.

Lichtenstein explained why Wal-Mart’s good press for its low prices does not tell the entire story about its effect on consumer buying power. Although Wal-Mart, by pressuring manufacturers firms all over the world to hold down costs at the expense of their own workers, has maintained low prices for its own products, Lichtenstein pointed out that what Wal-Mart sells amounts only about 18% of what people buy. This means that Wal-Mart’s anti-union and wage-suppression activities arguably do consumers more harm, in their general effect on the buying public’s income, than its prices do good.

However, as Lichtenstein observed, Wal-Mart is not invulnerable. Do to a confluence of the organized labor movement, local quality-of-life activists and small business owners; Wal-Mart has been kept away from coastal California, Chicago and other great commercial centers. And, in the climate of today’s economic turmoil, Wal-Mart has had to modify some longstanding policies.