If Wal-Mart’s aim were simply to dictate the price it will pay for a product, then leave up to its suppliers all decisions as to how to get to that price, it would cause far less economic damage than it does now. But that is not Wal-Mart’s way. Instead, the firm is also one of the world’s most intrusive, jealous, fastidious micromanagers, and its aim is nothing less than to remake entirely how its suppliers do business, not least so that it can shift many of its own costs of doing business onto them. In addition to dictating what price its suppliers must accept, Wal-Mart also dictates how they package their products, how they ship those products, and how they gather and process information on the movement of those products. ~Barry Lynn, Harper’s

As I read this, I was reminded of the habit common to American and European colonialist powers of seizing other countries’ customs houses and sending in military forces to confiscate the revenues indebted governments would have collected.  They did this as a way of making good on the fantastic amounts of credit Western banks had extended to poor, developing nations.  Even more similar in some ways was the British decision to liquidate indirect rule through the Company and take more hands-on control of India in order to secure revenue and security interests without the Company’s incompetence or errors getting in the way of what the government wanted.  The similarity lies in this: cut out the middle-man as much as possible and dictate how things function directly.  Wal-Mart does not merely set prices, but wants to dictate terms and leverages its power against its suppliers to get them to reorganise their businesses as it, the buyer, sees fit, removing the uncertainty of the other firms’ operating in ways that might threaten Wal-Mart’s goals.