Giving them the business.

The United States of Wal-Mart, by John Dicker (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 245 pp., $12.95)

The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company, by Don Soderquist (Nelson Business, 240 pp., $24.99)

THERE'S no more perfect person than I to write this review. I have shopped at Wal-Mart precisely twice, in Pennsylvania and in New Hampshire, and each time I was most impressed by its everyday low prices. But I can't say that, living as I do here in unWal-Marted, West Village Manhattan, I miss it. Put bluntly, I just don't care very much either way about Wal-Mart. So, when confronted by these two books-which take diametrically opposed positions on the Beast of Bentonville--I like to think that my judgment will be not just Solonic in its brilliant and masterful vigor, but Solomonic in its sheer disinterestedness.

Let us turn to the books under review. Each is a perfect specimen of a certain genre of literature, with all the pros and cons that entails. John Dicker's The United States of Wal-Mart is a classic anticorporate tract. So, on the front, we have a cartoon illustration, provided by that nice Ted Rall, of a bug-eyed Statue of Liberty clothed in a Wal-Mart-issued blue vest. On the back, there's a photo of Dicker, an earnest young man in a striped sweater who looks like the new social-studies teacher at a Midwestern high school. His bio tells us that "his work has been published in The Nation, Salon, and numerous alternative newsweeklies." Of course it has.

Dicker really hates Wal-Mart and everything it stands for, but replace "Wal-Mart" with Bechtel (remember them, back in the '80s?), Exxon, Starbucks, The Gap, McDonald's, Union Carbide, Nike, Monsanto, Halliburton, Philip Morris, the Carlyle Group, etc., and you'll find the arguments very, very familiar. That's not to say some of the criticism isn't true or deserved, it's just that it's kind of old.

Consequently, we hear the usual atrocity stories about evil union-busters, lack of health-care benefits, the refusal to pay a "livable wage," overseas sweatshop labor, the destruction of independent businesses, and so forth, all backed up with research culled from a quickie Lexis-Nexis search or derived from sympathetic sources. Thus, on page 223 alone, we find footnotes citing The Nation, Liza Featherstone's book Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart, the Colorado Springs Independent (one of the alternative weeklies for which Dicker has written), an interview with a union leader, and Socialist Worker Online. Unfortunately, Dicker doesn't appear to have talked to anyone actually working at Wal-Mart who's not already on his side.

The guy he should have talked to is Don Soderquist. He's the former vice chairman and chief operating officer of Wal-Mart, and you can tell. In his cover shot, he looks exactly what you would expect a Wal-Mart senior executive to look like, what with his conservatively trimmed gray hair and generic suburban-white-guy appearance. Soderquist is wearing a plain, white, buttoned-down, precisely ironed shirt, dark trousers, and a tightly knotted colorful-but-not-crazy-colorful (white, navy, burgundy, gray) tie designed to set off, yet complement, the rest of the pointedly bland, inoffensive look. No jacket, interestingly: These Big Biz guys have avoided the 1950s Corporation Man outfit ever since a jacketless Lee Iacocca was snapped for the cover of his bestselling autobiography. Since Iacocca's day, though, judging by recent book photos, America's supremos have also decided to abstain from wearing cufflinks--either because French cuffs detract from their self-image as Determined Innovators or because they come across as too swish in the red states. Soderquist, accordingly, has rolled his single-cuffed sleeves to the mid-forearm, amply demonstrating Wal-Mart's get-the-job-done approach to corporate leadership. Clipped to his breast pocket is a Wal-Mart I.D. card with "Don" modestly printed on it. He's just one of the guys.

The Wal-Mart Way is an exemplar of The Business Book, that all-American amalgam of folksy self-help advice, secularized Christian principles, and meaningless pap aimed at convincing you, Mr. Assistant Regional Marketing Coordinator, that you too are a titan in the making. These books have one common characteristic: Like Soderquist, they don't really say anything (even as Dicker & Co. say the same thing, over and over again). So there's lots of abstract talk about "vision," "the execution imperative," "making a commitment to help your customers succeed," and "achieving excellence," and there are suitably uplifting quotes from people like Benjamin Disraeli (a one-nation Tory I suspect would not be pleased with the Wal-Mart Way), Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Johnny Carson, and the like--but none of this is converted into describing the absolutely single-minded and fanatical ruthlessness with which Wal-Mart proceeds on its way to dominate the world and wedgie its competitors. Having ploughed through 200-odd pages of Soderquist's prose, I remain unaware of what exactly the Wal-Mart Way is, though it seems to have something to do with "improving the lifestyle of ordinary Americans" by being "the agent for the customer" and keeping prices "as low as we can" while adhering to Sam Walton's small-town principles.

Why all this brouhaha over a chain store, anyway? The issue hinges on whether corporations owe a "debt to society," and not just to their shareholders. But what kind of "society" should corporate "values" represent? As always, it all depends on who is doing the defining. The anti-corporate types--the Dicker sorts who typically denounce large companies as "soulless" and "uncaring"--envisage a social-democratic paradise of powerful unions, lavish benefits, and 35-hour workweeks. Presumably, like love in the Ring cycle, unionization will redeem the spiritually vacuous corporations that dominate the United States. The Soderquist camp, on the other hand, is convinced that corporations possess distinctive personalities, with their own (in this case, Wal-Mart's) "way" of behaving that is nurtured and enforced by the senior staff. These "personality" companies, it seems to me, worship either their founder or their CEO--Sam Walton, of course, but not forgetting Jack Welch of General Electric and Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway--in a cult form of basileiolatry. Just as medieval kings were the "fathers of their people," whose interests and instincts naturally coincided with those of the masses, today's corporate chieftains boast of the great things they and their everyday low prices do for their customers, and for society. The debt, so to speak, has been paid, and we owe fealty with our dollars.

So, is Wal-Mart good or bad? Tough question--and most likely a pointless one, since there is no way of accurately tallying the financial, political, and social pros and cons. All in all, I'd lean towards the positive side, for Wal-Mart does employ a staggeringly huge number of people here and abroad, does provide cheap products and useful services, does squeeze out inefficiencies by its suppliers, does contribute to dampening inflation by keeping prices low, does create competition for lazy local and regional retailers, and does venture into no-go urban areas ignored by other chains. On the negative side, Wal-Mart's big, gray box architecture is shamefully ugly, the company does drive local wages down and bankrupts downtown businesses (not all of which are worth saving, by the way), and it fetishizes low prices, creating consumerist waste as a result. Wal- Mart's not perfect, but then nothing is, and it's not the worst by far.