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.

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 $35000 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.