Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism and Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future.
Elmore applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet, and reported the following:
I’m using an advanced copy of the book when applying this test, but page 99 of my book on my desk explores the backlash Walmart faced as it tried to break into new markets outside the American South in the 1990s. The point of this portion of the chapter was to explain how rurality proved both a key ingredient to Walmart’s business growth in the twentieth century as well as a weakness. In the preceding pages, readers learn how the unique commercial ecology of Bentonville, Arkansas, spurred Sam Walton and his executive team to make innovations in logistics that ultimately revolutionized our global economy. The fact that Walton decided to site his stores in small, rural towns of a few thousand people was an important factor in terms of how the company designed its retail system. For one, there was little initial competition from other big-box stores, such as Kmart and Target, in these rural communities, something Walton noted in his own biography when he said he could “hide there in the hills” of the Ozarks out of sight of his rivals (85). But more importantly, serving such rural and remote communities meant the firm had to make advancements in retail techniques. “We were forced to be ahead of our time in distribution and in communication,” Sam Walton said, “because our stores were sitting out there in tiny little towns and we had to stay in touch and keep them supplied” (90). In this sense rurality was a key asset that made Walmart the largest corporation in the world by the start of the twenty-first century. Yet, by page 99, we see that rurality could also be a problem for Walmart, especially as it expanded into towns that feared Walmart’s presence would change the very rural aesthetic many people valued. We see that battle on this page and in other sections of this chapter.Learn more about the book and author at Bartow J. Elmore's website.
The Page 99 Test works here. This book traces the environmental history of five southern corporations—Coca-Cola, Delta, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America—and explains how these companies came to have outsized influence on our economy and the environment. There are two chapters devoted to each firm, and each chapter answers different questions. First, I seek to understand how each business’s unique geographic position in the American South contributed to its growth in the twentieth century. In answering this question for each firm, I discovered a pattern that became embedded in the title of the book. What I came to see is that each of these firms from the American South grew big in part by servicing the countryside, by seeing rural and less urban areas as an asset. I call this strategy for making money country capitalism and make clear throughout the book that southern firms were not the only businesses making money in this way in the twentieth century (think Sears in Chicago, for example). Nevertheless, I emphasize that the American South’s rural character meant that southern businesses found country capitalism particularly attractive. After exploring this question of the ecological roots of southern business success, I then turn to examine what that success meant for the ecological health of our planet. For each firm, I explore how an emphasis on long-distance transport of goods to and from remote markets and an obsession with have-it-now, instantaneous consumer gratification led to huge ecological impacts. My big point is to suggest that we need a new era of environmentalism and environmental regulations that recognizes that retail, logistics, and banking enterprises have become the dominant players in our economy, replacing industrial giants of old. With that understanding, it becomes clear that if we want to solve a problem as big as climate change, we need to focus our energies on these conduits of capitalism—these firms that have found a way to ship goods, people, and money so swiftly across our planet. In the end, this book suggests ways we might do just that, cutting supply chains that are feeding pollution problems warming our planet.
The Page 99 Test: Citizen Coke.
--Marshal Zeringue
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