Bethany Moreton on what makes Wal-Mart unique:
Like the majority of the world’s population, but unlike most other United States citizens, Wal-Mart’s core constituency only left the agrarian economy in the third quarter of the twentieth century. The frames of reference it carried into the age of terabytes therefore sound anomalous to the representatives of industrial modernity. But as the Chicken Patrol suggests, anomaly is in the eye of the beholder. The high-tech redneck, the rustic with a Bible in one hand and a Blackberry in the other, is only paradoxical from the perspective of a stage theory of history. Innovation from the agricultural periphery only shocks if we assume that the industrial North Atlantic leads and everyone else will follow, at their own remedial pace, along the same path.
In fact, however, it is the reputed "antimodernists" who have shown a consistent talent for innovation. The rural South embraced distance commerce back when it meant mail-order catalogues and global cotton markets. Fundamentalist preachers first seized the new technology of radio and then cable television to create a congregation of the air. In the 1970s, the Moral Majority mastered computerized direct mail to remake national politics. And, indeed, one small-town retailer set the technological standard for a global economic empire. Observers who thus mistake style for substance, as the Chicken Patrollers know, reveal more about their own assumptions than about the objects of their interest. To reject Detroit as the universal telos, it turns out, is not to reject progress itself.
In fact, however, it is the reputed "antimodernists" who have shown a consistent talent for innovation. The rural South embraced distance commerce back when it meant mail-order catalogues and global cotton markets. Fundamentalist preachers first seized the new technology of radio and then cable television to create a congregation of the air. In the 1970s, the Moral Majority mastered computerized direct mail to remake national politics. And, indeed, one small-town retailer set the technological standard for a global economic empire. Observers who thus mistake style for substance, as the Chicken Patrollers know, reveal more about their own assumptions than about the objects of their interest. To reject Detroit as the universal telos, it turns out, is not to reject progress itself.
That's from the first chapter of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, an eye-opener of a book that goes way beyond the standard journalistic accounts of the company's rise to provide less a history of the company per se than a biography of the world that is Wal-Mart. And it's a different world than those of us on the east coast (particularly its upper geographical reaches) are used to studying. For those of you wondering just where today's service economy actually came from, you can't do much better for an explanation than this -- carefully researched and written with considerable spark.
