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Books > History > History of specific subjects > History of specific institutions
How America's biggest company began taking better care of its
workers--and why such efforts will never be enough.Fifteen years
ago, Walmart was the most controversial company in America. By
offering incredibly low prices, it had come to dominate the retail
landscape. But with this dominance came a suite of ethical
concerns. Walmart was accused of wiping out of mom-and-pop
businesses across the country; ruthlessly pressuring suppliers to
cut costs, even if it meant closing up U.S. factories and moving
production overseas; and, above all, not taking adequate care of
its own employees, who were paid so little that many wound up on
public assistance. Today, while Walmart remains America's largest
employer, the picture is very different. It has become an
environmental leader among businesses, and has taken many other
steps to use its immense scale to have a positive social impact.
Most notably, its starting wage has risen from $7.25 to $12, and
employee benefits have improved. With internal and external threats
to its business looming, the company began to change directions in
2005-a transformation that accelerated in 2014, with the arrival of
CEO Doug McMillon. By undertaking such large-scale change without a
legal mandate to do so, Walmart has joined a number of major
corporations that say they are dedicated to practicing a new,
socially conscious form of capitalism.In Still Broke, award-winning
author Rick Wartzman goes inside the company's transformation,
showing in novelistic detail how the company has gotten to where it
is. Yet he also asks a critical question: is it enough? With a
still-simmering public debate around the minimum wage and
widespread movements by workers demanding better treatment, how far
will $12 an hour go in today's economy? Or even $15? Or Walmart's
average wage, which now hovers above $16-but, even so, doesn't
pencil out to so much as $35,000 a year for a fulltime worker? In
the richest nation on earth, how did the bar get set so low? How
did America find itself relying on an army of low-wage workers
without ever acknowledging their most basic needs? And if Walmart's
brand of change is the best we have, how can we ever expect to
build a healthy society?With unparalleled access to the key
executives and change-makers at Walmart, Still Broke does more than
document a remarkable business makeover. It interrogates the role
of business in American life, and asks what the future of our
economy and country can be-and whose job it is to make it.
An unlikely bookseller in New York City became the leading dealer
in rare Western Americana for most of the twentieth century. After
working in western-U.S. and South American gold mines at the turn
of the twentieth century, Edward Eberstadt (1883-1958) returned to
his home in New York City in 1907. Through luck and happenstance,
he purchased an old book for fifty cents that turned out to be a
rare sixteenth-century Mexican imprint. From this bit of
serendipity, Eberstadt quickly became one of the leading western
Americana rare book dealers. In this book Michael Vinson tells the
story of how Edward Eberstadt & Sons developed its legendary
book collection, which formed the backbone of many of today's top
western Americana archives. Although the firm's business records
have not survived, Edward and his sons, Charles and Lindley, were
all prodigious letter writers, and nearly every collector kept his
or her correspondence. Drawing upon these letters and on his own
extensive experience in the rare book trade, Vinson gives the
reader a vivid sense of how the commerce in rare books and
manuscripts unfolded during the era of the Eberstadts, particularly
in the relationships between dealers and customers. He explores the
backstory that scholars of art history and museology have pursued
in recent decades: the assembling of cultural treasures, their
organization for use, and the establishment of institutions to
support that use. His work describes the important role this key
bookselling firm played in the western Americana trade from the
early 1900s to Eberstadt & Sons' dissolution in 1975. From Yale
University and the American Antiquarian Society to the Newberry
Library and the Huntington Library, the firm of Edward Eberstadt
& Sons has left its mark in western Americana repositories
across the nation. Told here for the first time, the Eberstadt
story reveals how one family's business and legacy have shaped the
study of the American West.
Romance novels have attracted considerable attention since their
mass market debut in 1939, yet seldom has the industry itself been
analyzed. Founded in 1949, Harlequin quickly gained market
domination with their contemporary romances. Other publishers
countered with historical romances, leading to the rise of
""bodice-ripper"" romances in the 1970s. The liberation of the
romance novel's content during the 1980s brought a vitality to the
market that was dubbed a revolution, but the real romance
revolution began in the 1990s with developments in the mainstream
publishing industry and continues today. This book traces the
history and evolution of the romance industry, covering successful
(and not so successful) trends and describing changes in romance
publishing that paved the way for the many popular subgenres
flooding the market in the 21st century.
In September, 2015 President Barack Obama informed The Forward, in
a historic interview, of his shock at learning of the closing of
his favorite NYC Bagel eatery, H&H Bagels, in January of 2012.
While the President was shocked by the closing of the world's most
famous, and recognizable, bagel brand, what was truly shocking were
the underlying facts and circumstances surrounding the closing.
While most people knew H&H as the iconic, Upper West Side Bagel
Shop where the lines rounded the block, where celebrities loved to
frequent, and where one of the most popular Seinfeld television
episodes was created, few people knew about the drama and decadence
that existed behind the scenes of this NYC landmark. The Rise and
Fall of H&H Bagels takes you on a journey that starts with the
fulfillment of the American Dream and ends in contested, five year
Bankruptcy. This is the outrageous, true, story of a man who defied
the odds and became an American legend, and then defied logic and
the law by dismantling his beloved Empire. The story of H&H
Bagels is not only the story of the rise and fall of a thriving
American business, it is a story of intrigue, economics,
corruption, and resiliency, as told, with humor, from the
perspective of the one man who lived through it all-its National
Business Manager and right hand to the man at the top of the
H&H Empire, Helmer Toro.
Did the Chiko Roll change Australian history? As a matter of fact,
yes. Efforts by the reviled US company IT&T to take over the
company making the Roll in the early 1970s marked a turning point
in Australian foreign investment policy. And this is just one of
the strange twists and turns in the buying and selling of
Australia. Takeover is an authoritative, engaging account of the
history of foreign investment in Australia - both the economics and
the politics. It explores the strange coalitions of left and right
that have sought to insulate us from the world economy and the
equally unpredictable forces that have embraced it. It is a story
of the fights between the protectionists and free traders of the
nineteenth century, of our relationships with the US, Britain,
Japan and China, and of the rise of Google and Uber. Australia's
economy has been built on the back of foreign capital - alone among
nations advanced or emerging, we have been able to run deficits
with the world throughout our history precisely because foreigners
are so keen to invest here. Yet there is an insecurity about the
source of our prosperity coming from somewhere else. Where does the
national interest lie, and what issues are at stake?
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