[Originally published in: Datyon Daily News, Sunday, Feb 19, 2006, B5 - by Cecil Johnson, Knight Ridder Newspapers]

The fate of Huffy Corp. of Miamisburg is offered as one of the classic cases of what can happen to a company that becomes a Wal-Mart vendor.

Attention Wal-Mart shoppers! There's a dark cloud draped over the silver lining of the low prices you pay at the big-box stores of the world's largest company, BusinessWeek writer Anthony Bianco says.

In "The Bully of Bentonville," Bianco produces the most penetrating examination of Wal-Mart's business practices and their ripple effects in American society that has been published since Wal-Mart watching became a serious pursuit of the business press and academia.

• Tracing the rise of Wal-Mart from obscurity in the Ozarks to the top of the mountain among discounters and ultimately to its current place as one of the world's largest companies.
• Examining the way Wal-Mart treats its employees and underscoring the company's extreme hostility to labor unions.
• Showing how Wal-Mart pressures its vendors into outsourcing to China and other underdeveloped countries in order to cut costs and meet its low-price ultimatums.
• Spotlighting many of the instances in which Wal-Mart has thrown its financial and political weight around to force communities to change land-use restrictions to allow it to build supercenters, despite intense community opposition to them.
• Underscoring how the connection between Wal-Mart's everyday low prices and the outsourcing they cause results in the loss thousands of American jobs and the transfer of whole industries from the United States to China and other countries.

The fate of the Huffy Corp. of Celina, Ohio, is offered as one of the classic cases of what can happen to a company that becomes a Wal-Mart vendor. According to Bianco, Wal-Mart ordered 900,000 bicycles at one time, conditioned on a sizable reduction in price per unit.

The bicycle company opened a second factory in Farmington, Mo., that was staffed with low-paid, nonunion workers to meet the demand. But at the Wal-Mart price, Huffy lost $10 million in 1995, and had to negotiate a pay cut with its unionized workers in Celina. The union members agreed just to keep their jobs.

But Wal-Mart kept up the price-cut pressure; Huffy closed its Celina plant, laying off 935 workers, then shifted production to the Missouri plant and opened another in Southhaven, Miss. But even the nonunion workers in those plants earned more than Huffy could pay and still make Wal-Mart's price. The bicycle maker then closed both those factories and subcontracted all its work to China, where bicycle plant workers were paid 25 cents to 41 cents an hour. Still Huffy fell into bankruptcy in 2004, and its biggest creditor was its Chinese subcontractor. Its possessions were turned over to an agency of the Chinese government.

But that's not the real glaring irony of the story. That occurred back in Celina, Ohio, where a developer built a Wal-Mart supercenter on the site of the historic old Huffy plant. Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota noted sourly, "Workers who got laid off from the Huffy plant can go and purchase a Chinese-made Huffy bike."

Bianco's book is full of fascinating recapitulations of that kind. Those reprises of what the Wal-Martization of the world is doing to other companies and workers drive home the point that Wal-Mart could be its own undoing if it keeps putting Americans out of work and rendering them unable to shop even at its stores.

"The Bully of Bentonville: How the High Cost of Wal-Mart's Everyday Low Prices Is Hurting America," by Anthony Bianco (Currency, 336 pages, $24.95)