To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

If I hadn't been disenchanted by free enterprise before, I would be after reading this book. ( )

This book traces Wal-mart's development from a local store in the Ozarks to the largest corporation in the world. Moreton argues that it does this through adaptable business strategies that incorporated ideas of Christian service, family structure and free enterprise. She starts by showing how Sam Walton turned the disadvantages of being in Arkansas into advantages. He initially kept ownership to his family, then store managers and then the local areas so to contrast the national chains. He also tapped into the social structure of the area that put men in management and women as store workers. He developed a family structure for each store to develop employee loyalty and morale.

She shows that Wal-mart promoted Christian-style service and then brought in Christian business. This was not because of Walton's religious feeling, which appears to have been lukewarm, but because it made good business sense. Christian merchandise and events made a lot of money, so Wal-mart promoted them.

The book moves onto Wal-mart going national and exerting some influence on culture. It linked with Students in Free Enterprise to indoctrinate students in the value of capitalism and then recruit them into it management system. It helped fund evangelical schools in the Ozarks to promote free enterprise. It funded scholarships for Central Americans to study at those schools and then return how as apostles of the American system (free-enterprise and Christianity).

The section on international scholarships is when Wal-mart started to go global. But its big step was opening a store in Mexico, which Moreton says nearly single-handedly got NAFTA passed by showing how Mexicans wanted to buy American goods. Then she shows how Wal-mart led the way in creating a global supply chain and in opening outlets abroad.

This book is superbly researched, but has very little to link it together except that Wal-mart is in every chapter. It is basically a corporate history, which is useful to people interested in business, but each chapter is only loosely connected to the others so it seems disjointed. It is provides some interesting insight into the Ozarks, but beyond that, it isn't much use. I found her analysis of gender issues in the company to be inconsistent and unconvincing. There were definitely problems of gender there, but she doesn't show much on Wal-mart being different in wanting male executives. The section on NAFTA was interesting, but I will want to find some other analyses of ratification before I'll give too much weight to Moreton's findings.

Overall, I'd say skip it. ( )

The spectacular rise and astounding success of retail giant Wal-Mart has puzzled business observers for decades. How did someone who seems like nothing so much as a ‘hick from the sticks’ shepherd a single five and dime store in rural Arkansas, the heart of the anti-corporatist stronghold that had “fought against large corporations and for increased government safeguards,” into the largest corporation in the world? Author Bethany Moreton frames the story as “the Wal-Mart paradox.” According to her, Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, turned what for many would seem like insurmountable obstacles into defining advantages. By tapping directly into the social fabric of the rural communities in which his stores were located, Walton was able to dominate retail competition and force that same outlook out into the larger world as well.

Moreton tells the history of Sam Walton and Wal-Mart from Walton’s very earliest days as an entrepreneur in the Ozark Mountains. That area in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas is isolated, insular, and ideologically conservative. An area that had held onto a lifestyle of family farms far longer than most, it was also an area that opposed big business most stridently. As Moreton stated, it was an area that “suffered at the hands of Northern railroads, Eastern banks, and industrial monopolies that demonstrable extracted wealth in a semicolonial relationship with the hinterlands.” However, Walton was able to turn that mindset to his advantage by presenting his company as local.

Walton’s business plan called for only local investors, at first family members. Later, he offered his store managers the opportunity to become investors, which allowed him to avoid the ire of those most opposed to industrial monopolies. Walton could present his stores as locally owned and operated which gave him a distinct advantage over other mass retailers, such as Target and K-Mart which also opened their first stores in 1962. Once the first stores had shown a pattern of success, Walton added economic efficiencies to the mix.

Walton carefully planned the expansion of his company. New stores opened concentrically from the distribution center in Bentonville, Arkansas. His goal was that no store be more than a day’s drive from the center. Additionally, as the company spread, it moved outward one community at a time. This allowed for word of mouth to spread to the neighboring communities, thus ameliorating the need for advertising expenditures. Walton’s greatest entrepreneurial genius may have been demonstrated through his melding of a “populist corporate image” with an “evolving Christian culture.”

The stores were also structured on the traditional family units that had been prevalent on the farms, with the men at the head of the family and the women in a subservient role. This led to a management cadre that was almost exclusively male, and an entry level workforce that was almost as exclusively female. As Moreton described it, Walton took advantage of harsh economic times and used the fundamentalist bent of his community to his advantage in hiring and promoting workers. As Wal-Mart started adding stores, the Ozark communities in which they were being built were losing many family farms. Those women who were newly seeking employment outside the homestead for the first time were happy to receive the minimum wages jobs.

Additionally, Walton and the Wal-Mart managers have positioned their stores as the wholesome alternative to “big city” retailers, by really pushing “the whole family values thing.” Though eschewing such labels well into the 1990s, the company has wholeheartedly embraced this identity from that point forward. This may have been after conservative Christian leader Ralph Reed stated that “if you want to reach the Christian population on Sunday, you do it from the church pulpit. If you want to reach them on Saturday, you do it in a Wal-Mart.” By positioning the company in this way, Wal-Mart has been able to take advantage of the growing “Southernization” of America and expand the brand across the country and the globe.
( )

My low rating for this book is perhaps unfair and possibly inaccurate, but it reflects my reading experience. Moreton goes into painful detail on the ties between the evolution of Wal-Mart and how "a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad." Her research is exhaustive, but I quickly became exhausted. This was way, way too long and she lost me in the minutiae. There were some interesting bits, but overall I found this very dull.

Part of the problem is that I expected a professor of history and women's studies to present more of a criticism of the retailer and the free enterprise system in general. Instead, at times this read like an apologia, as an earlier reviewer also noticed. Further, she completely lost me on the whole "service" slant to her argument since my admittedly limited experience with Wal-Mart evokes no memories of any service. Still, it's a professional, meticulously researched piece that might appeal to someone looking for an economic and cultural history. ( )

This book was not at all what I expected. The book addresses the Christian beliefs of Wal-Mart's founders and a select few employees. This handful of people are the audience for the book. Not the average Wal-Mart shopper that is looking for God.
I wish I hadn't bought it. ( )