It will be interesting to see if Wal-Mart carries Gordon Laird’s new book. Laird repeatedly cites the Arkansas-based super-retailer as the most prominent purveyor of bargains and one of the primary beneficiaries of our lust for cheap stuff. Laird attempts to show how Wal-Mart and other (mainly North American) retailers have earned greater profits through low production costs – chiefly, by employing cheap labour from the developing world and exploiting inexpensive crude oil. In turn, they have lured suburban consumers by offering bargain-basement prices on products they don’t really need. Laird argues that this formula – which has, until very recently, proven highly successful – is partly responsible for everything from poverty at home and abroad to environmental degradation to the credit crunch that partly caused the most recent recession.       

The book contains a great deal of interesting and enterprising reporting, taking the author from the oil sands of northern Alberta to the site of the first big box stores in California to China’s vast and expanding industrial wastelands. Laird successfully conveys the scope of the problems he covers, although he fails to attach a human face to the suffering caused by the so-called corporate “bargaineers.“

While Laird makes some very compelling points, his conclusions are often far too simplistic and reductive. The most egregious example of an overly broad statement can be found in the second sentence of his last chapter: “Bargains represent the core work of Western civilization for the past two hundred years: more, cheaper, better.”

While Laird astutely notes that the rise of fuel prices and the recent recession may conspire to help bring about radical change, he offers no alternative scenario other than the status quo or the sudden, total collapse of globalization. Laird convincingly makes the case that the unfettered growth and cross-national capitalistic exploitation described in The Price of a Bargain needs to be remedied. But he should also have devoted some space to the work of economists and other academics who are thinking seriously about how to balance the need for slower economic growth with finding ways to maintain and improve quality of life.