In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and Wal-Mart, the World's Most Powerful Retailer - Hardcover

Ortega, Bob

4.02

105 ratings by Goodreads

9780812963779: In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and Wal-Mart, the World's Most Powerful Retailer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812963776 ISBN 13: 9780812963779

Publisher: Crown Business, 1998

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Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world, the biggest private-sector employer in North America, and one of the most dominant and influential corporations anywhere. But until now, no journalist has thoroughly investigated all of the company's controversial practices and told the true, unvarnished story of founder Sam Walton's life and his particular genius. In Sam We Trust is Bob Ortega's illuminating and authoritative account of the world's biggest and most powerful store, and of how Walton's way of thinking is transforming America's business practices, workplaces, and communities.

Sam Walton built the greatest retail empire in history by steadfastly holding true to his vision of making profits by bringing low prices to the masses. A flinty workaholic obsessed with his stores at the expense of his personal life, Walton developed a ruthlessly efficient strategy that enabled Wal-Mart to surpass Sears, outsmart Kmart, and crush small-town mom-and-pop stores. He revolutionized retailing by creating innovative information and distribution systems that were years ahead of the competition.

By encouraging employees to become shareholders in his company, and through the sheer force of his charismatic personality, Walton created a corporate culture unlike any other. So complete was Walton's power over employees that even when he threatened to shut down stores or fire workers to keep unions out, he could win people's trust with promises to treat them better. Wal-Mart workers still pledge to work harder and better by uttering the phrase "So help me Sam."

Meanwhile, back on Main Street, Wal-Mart's unmatched success has raised troubling questions about the company's impact on communities and its treatment of workers. Activists have been waging increasingly impassioned campaigns to keep the colossus from invading towns and suburbs and threatening local businesses. Thousands of miles away, some of Wal-Mart's suppliers have been caught using child labor, and pitchwoman Kathie Lee Gifford has become embroiled in a national controversy over her line of clothing.

Bob Ortega, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter who has covered Wal-Mart more extensively than perhaps any other writer, has investigated Wal-Mart and the way it does business. He shows how the company's relentless bottom-line mentality has been both a boon and a bane to workers and their communities. In this balanced and thorough work of business history, Bob Ortega tells a remarkable success story that illustrates the glory as well as the underbelly of American capitalism. Ultimately, In Sam We Trust raises important questions about the social responsibility of America's most powerful corporations.

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Review:

In In Sam We Trust, investigative journalist Bob Ortega exposes the underside of Wal-Mart and defrocks Sam Walton, the founder of the retailing mammoth. Ortega chronicles Walton's rise from a backwater retailer in Arkansas to one of the richest men in the country. While Walton carefully crafted a public image as a regular guy who drove a pickup and wore a name tag at his stores, Ortega paints a different picture of a two-faced and ruthless invader of small-town America. Walton was so stingy that his chain was last among major retailers in charity donations in terms of percentage of earnings. He hurt the downtowns of many communities by building Wal-Marts on the outskirts and capturing up to 75 percent of his sales from the preexisting stores. The late billionaire was obsessed with profits and cutting costs. He pioneered temporary help--a third of Wal-Mart's employees are part-time and the average worker only earns about $7.50 an hour. Even while making a big media splash with a "Buy American" program in the 1980s, Walton quietly expanded his company's Hong Kong staff and continued to import apparel made by cheap child labor in the Third World.

But, as Ortega points out, Walton was also a retailing visionary. He saw opportunity long before others and was the first to go big with discount stores in smaller cities and towns. All the while, he stuck to his formula of offering the lowest possible prices and profiting from vast sales volumes. He invested early in computers and satellite communications for his stores. And he raced past competitors such as Sears and Kmart with an incredibly lean and fast distribution system. Ortega, who took a leave from the staff of the Wall Street Journal to write this book, pursued Walton's legacy across America to town squares such as Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which finally succumbed to Wal-Mart, and Greenfield, Massachusetts, where activists blocked the store. He interviewed hundreds of people including many former and top Wal-Mart officials. Ortega even hunts down Wal-Mart's suppliers in Central America to document the exploitation of children in clothing factories. In Sam We Trust is an important work about a man who changed the face of retailing, for better and worse. --Dan Ring

From the Back Cover:

"In Sam We Trust is a well-wrought account of a complex empire-builder, and the amazing retail machine he fathered. Bob Ortega's lucid, gloves-off storytelling cuts into the dense veil of myth surrounding Sam Walton, richest of them all for a time and a consummately American genius of the sale. A vivid portrait of Walton and Wal-Mart is the impressive result." --Donald Katz, author of The Big Score

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