From the shuttered factories of the rust belt to the look-alike strip malls of the sun belt-and almost everywhere in between-America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little examined obsession is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time-the engine of globalization, outsourcing, planned obsolescence, and economic instability in an increasingly unsettled world. Low price is so...

"Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce--young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one possible future of work--Walmartism--in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyper-rationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curtail workers' ability to control their working conditions and their lives. In Working...