Cart Blanche?

There's the question of Wal-Mart's rock-bottom wages and benefits. Had he been able to talk to CEO Lee Scott, Fishman says, he'd have asked about Wal-Mart's "brutal" 50 percent turnover rate: "Why do you allow 650,000 of your employees in the U.S. to leave every year?"

There's the company's recently announced concern with environmental sustainability. "We're very passionate about sustainability at Wal-Mart," Scott told the nation's governors in Washington in February. Is he serious? If so, how will he change a culture that for 40 years has focused, with messianic zeal, on lowering prices at all costs?

Wal-Mart, which has put more energy into defending its image lately than it used to, has nonetheless chosen to ignore "The Wal-Mart Effect." ("We really do not have comment on the book" was spokeswoman Mona Williams's response to an interview request.)

But however his efforts are viewed in Bentonville, Fishman is not a blame-Wal-Mart-for-everything kind of guy. Wal-Mart didn't create globalization all by itself, he says, and America's health care crisis is bigger than any one corporation -- however outsize -- can deal with alone. At the end of his book, in fact, he puts the ball right back in our court.

"Wal-Mart is the ultimate form of democracy -- we vote yes each time we buy something," he writes. The problem is, we don't know enough to understand what our vote means.

Speaking of which, I've got a decision to make. Am I going to buy my daughter the socks we've finally tracked down: plain white, Fruit of the Loom, $3.76 for five pair? They've got a stick-on label that says "Made in Turkey."

Fishman peels it back. Underneath, it says "Made in the USA."

Is this more evidence of the Wal-Mart effect? There's no way for us to know. Maybe Fruit of the Loom was going global anyway. Maybe it just had some extra pre-printed bags. Meanwhile, that price seems awfully good . . .

I toss the socks in the shopping cart. Pretty soon we're heading for the checkout line.