Wal-Mart is a little good, a little bad

Wal-Mart. Speak this hyphenated word, and you'll get an instant response.

To some, the name of the world's largest retailer stands for everything that's wrong with corporate capitalism. Declining wages, suburban sprawl, cheap foreign goods destroying American jobs, reckless corporate welfare, disappearing unions. — You name the malady, and there's surely a way to implicate Wal-Mart.

For others, the behemoth's "always low prices" are the gateway to consumer bliss. Where else can you get a $38.76 DVD player or a $42.44 microwave oven?

Wal-Mart may be widely reviled, but there's also a reason why it rakes in almost $300 billion a year.

Wherever you stand on the Wal-Mart debate, with anti-Wal-Mart campaigns popping up as fast as Wal-Mart stores (well, not quite that fast; Wal-Mart opens about 275 Supercenters a year), it's clear that the company is a force to be understood.

There are many books out there trying to make sense of Wal-Mart, and John Dicker's informative and entertaining new "The United States of Wal-Mart" (Tarcher/Penguin, 245 pp., $18) is one of the best. Instead of merely disparaging Wal-Mart (which seems to have been Dicker's initial temptation), he makes the effort to understand Wal-Mart's appeal. And in doing so, the narrative, which begins in mere bemusement ("We're all Wal-Mart's bitches"), evolves into a more nuanced sort of befuddlement ("Wal-Mart is a lot like the country where it was born — a little good, a little bad, a lot confusing").

By the end, Dicker looks in the mirror and reaches a surprising conclusion: "The ugly truth is that we've become a nation that values little above a bargain." He writes, "As long as we remain blind to those consequences (of Wal-Mart's practices), we will also remain blind to the costs we pay, not at Wal-Mart but in our own conflicted souls." We have met the enemy, and it is us.

Of course, Wal-Mart is pretty bad, and Dicker doesn't spare the emblematic anecdotes. For one, there's the response of former Wal-Mart CEO David Glass to allegations of child labor in foreign factories. "You and I might, perhaps, define children differently," Glass told an NBC Dateline interviewer, then said that since Asians are quite short, you can't always tell how old they are.

Dateline investigators also found clothing made in Bangladesh sold under MADE IN THE USA signs in Wal-Mart stores.