Cart Blanche?

Or maybe both: The two versions aren't contradictory, after all.

But to Fishman, all of that is just the beginning of what Wal-Mart means. However you choose to judge the company, he argues, Wal-Mart is a retail planet with a gravitational pull so strong it shapes our economic universe in ways we can barely comprehend.

What happens when a single enterprise gets so huge it has no real rivals? Wal-Mart, Fishman points out, "is as big as Home Depot, Kroger, Target, Costco, Sears and Kmart combined." What happens when it can dictate how and where the companies with which it deals do business? Wal-Mart has become a prime mover in economic globalization, "accelerating the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries" in the name of keeping its prices down.

"The Wal-Mart Effect," which has drawn favorable reviews and made several business bestseller lists, is an attempt to show just how pervasive Wal-Mart's influence really is.

It started as an article for Fast Company, a business magazine for which the 45-year-old Fishman works as a senior editor. (Earlier in his career, he did stints at several newspapers, including a few years at The Washington Post.) In 2003, his boss asked him to write about the culture of Bentonville -- the small Arkansas town dominated by Wal-Mart's headquarters -- and in particular, about the sad plight of the urbane corporate types forced to relocate there to service their companies' Wal-Mart accounts.

Fishman didn't much like the idea. "The sophisticated people come to Hicksville -- it isn't amusing, and it isn't true," he says. If an enterprise he calls "the most powerful company in history" comes out of Arkansas, then "I guess the hicks have got something going on ."

His wife, an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, suggested a different approach. Couldn't he write more broadly about the benefits and costs of being a Wal-Mart supplier? How much does being in a "partnership" with a store so big that 100 million Americans shop there every week put you under Bentonville's thumb?

Intrigued, Fishman set out to understand this relationship. He asked a former Kraft executive he knew, now a business school professor, for guidance. The man wouldn't go on the record, and he wouldn't talk about Kraft's actual relationship with Wal-Mart, but he offered a helpful hypothetical:

Suppose you're the manager of barbecue sauce at Kraft, he began. You go down to Bentonville to show off the new label on your bottles and the summer's jazzy cardboard display, "and all they say is: 'What's your price?' And you say, '99 cents a bottle.' And they say, 'You know, we don't care about the cardboard display, that's cute and everything, but, 79 cents.' "

How do you deal with that? Fishman asked.

"You slap your palm on your forehead and you say: '79 cents a bottle! What a brilliant idea!' "

And if you don't?