Rick Wartzman is a journalist, editor and director of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society at the Drucker Institute, a part of Claremont Graduate University. He writes about the world of work for Fortune magazine online and worked as a reporter and editor for The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times for two decades. While business editor of The Times, he helped shape a three-part series on Wal-Mart’s impact on the economy and society, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
Below, Rick shares 5 key insights from his new book, Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism. Listen to the audio version—read by Rick himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
For about a decade and a half beginning in 2000, Walmart was routinely portrayed as greedy, if not downright malevolent. “If you really—we mean really—want to scare the locals next Halloween, here’s an early costume idea for you or your kids: dress up as Walmart,” two commentators wrote in 2008. Tellingly, this zinger didn’t come from a pair of union backers or liberal pols. It was served up by two officials from the Federal Reserve Bank.
Walmart was blamed for all sorts of ills: killing off Main Street mom-and-pop businesses, driving U.S. manufacturing overseas, and above all, mistreating its frontline workers. Many folks won’t step into a Walmart to this day.
Over the years though, Walmart has taken a...
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