Book Review: Walmart in China, Edited by Anita Chan

Walmartization has become a buzzword, a way of quantifying the retail behemoth's impact in the world. Walmart In China, is a new collection of essays edited by Anita Chan and published by Cornell University Press, that chronicles not just the flow of goods from China to the United States and distribution on Walmart's shelves but also the ways that Walmart stores in China are changing the lives of the Chinese consumer. Walmart may have started out in China looking for suppliers but they ended up creating what could be their largest army of shoppers.

Walmart's world buying center is in Shenzhen in Guangdong Province, China. Part of Walmart's genius is that although it sells many brand names it has also moved beyond brands in some ways, teaching consumers to value price over all else. For the producers of the goods this often causes a problem--Walmart orders are the biggest but the margins are cut so slim that profit is much diminished. And as for Walmart's stance on worker rights? The real story is what you probably already suspect-- that cheap goods always have their cost. Workers are asked to clock out but keep working and a shell game of shadow factories help the producers skate through inspections.

In China, the retail side of Walmart is nothing like it is in the United States. Employees wear yuan bills pinned to their name tags so that customers who feel they did not get adequate customer service can take the bill. The poor reputation that Walmart has in the rest of the world hasn't fully seeped into China yet and Walmart culture in China is full of go-getters and high achievers. The stores themselves are different too, more akin to the chaotic marketplace familiar to Chinese shoppers than the bland and orderly American stores. Part of the story of Walmart in China is also about unions and the slow process of organizing workers. Whatever the future of Walmart will be, the workers in China, both in the factories and in the stores, will play a key role.

Rather than a series of separate essays, this book is more of a true collaboration with authors referring back to colleagues' findings in previous chapters. The book incorporates the results of several studies, years of interviews and many first-hand accounts to create a scholarly evaluation of one company's impact on one of the world's biggest economies.