Bethany Moreton on what makes Wal-Mart unique:
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.