From The American Prospect:
Wal-Mart casts a global shadow across the lives of hundreds of millions of people, whether or not they ever enter a Supercenter. With $405 billion in sales in the last fiscal year, Wal-Mart is so big, and so obsessively focused on cost-cutting, that its actions shape our landscape, work, income distribution, consumption patterns, transport and communication, politics and culture, and the organization of industries from retail to manufacturing, from California to China.... The preponderance of research tells a different story. The net effect of Wal-Mart entering a local market is to reduce local employment, reduce area wage rates and total payroll (especially in retail), eliminate other businesses (especially small shops and small chain stores that directly compete with Wal-Mart), and raise poverty rates. University of California, Irvine, economist David Neumark and colleagues reported in a 2007 study that "on average, Wal-Mart store openings reduce retail employment by about 2.7 percent, implying that each Wal-Mart employee replaces about 1.4 employees in the rest of the retail sector."

For the full story, please visit http://prospect.org/article/how-wal-mart-shapes-world.