by JULIET WATERS

In researching Wal-Mart, John Dicker seems to have learned something about how to sell. Wal-Mart gets customers into its stores with a gleeful price-slashing smiley. Dicker has been doing something similar with what amounts to a gleeful scowley. Just try and find one review of The United States of Wal-Mart that doesn't open with the quote, "It's hard to know exactly when it happened, just as it's impossible to know if, or when, it will end. But for now, it's clear: we're all Wal-Mart's bitches."

This review is no exception, which may make me just one more of Dicker's bitches. But while I'll concur that his book represents some of the best aspects of alternative journalism, it's a prime example of one of its worst - the tendency to revel in cynicism.

If you're willing, however, to start with the premise - and why not, it seems to be a pretty sound one - that Wal-Mart is an especially bad example of exploitative labour practices, then this is an unusually entertaining and readable account of a normally depressing subject. Dickers gets it all down: the low, low wages, the unaffordable health insurance package, the gender discrimination, the union-busting tactics (with a fairly detailed account of recent events in Jonquière), and the rampant destruction of small, medium and even large retailers. He does a thorough and interesting analysis of the myth of founder Sam Walton, the frugal billionaire. To his credit, he doesn't entirely leave out some of the good: the jobs created in hopelessly deteriorated rural and urban areas that other employers have ignored, and the fact that there actually are people who benefit from low, low prices. Dicker is at his best when he's charting the uncanny parallels between Wal-Mart's global domination and classic Maoist strategy "Conquer the countryside, then take the cities."

It's a strategy that seems to be working just as well for the Republican party, which, needless to say, has a thriving partnership with the retail giant. But it has its limits. As Dicker himself outlines, when it gets to the cities, Wal-Mart hits an inevitable wall of insurgency. It has been largely shut out of New York, Chicago and L.A. Meanwhile, more and more small communities are rising up against the threat of the Super Center, Wal-Mart-owned malls that destroy not just retailers and grocers but all small town businesses from hairdressers to mechanics.

Dicker's heart is obviously in the right place, even when one quip too many threatens to undermine a book that offers some pretty choice nuggets (who knew Hilary Clinton was the first woman appointed to Wal-Mart's board of governors?). But his bum-spanking conclusion - that it's we the consumers, citizens in this culture of "incurable discount addicts," who bear the ultimate responsibility for Wal-Mart's rising power - well, that begs for an argument. Of course we need to reign in our rampant consumerism for a host of reasons, not just to kill Wal-Mart.

Dicker also virtually ignores some of the complex and interesting trends that do not bode well for Sam's empire. Costco's profits, for instance, have risen 22 per cent in the last year and the company continues to dominate warehouse retailing, keeping Sam's Club in second place. Yet Costco's average wage is $17 an hour, it has a health benefits package that puts the entire retail industry to shame, and is so union-friendly it has the Teamsters sounding like cheerleaders. Also in April, eight leading garment manufacturers, including Nike and The Gap, banded together with the leading anti-sweatshop organizations to start a pilot project in Turkey which may plant the seeds of something like a Kyoto Accord of labour standards. Pressure on Wal-Mart is clearly building.

I'm all for recreational negativity, and bitching about Wal-Mart is probably healthier than shopping there. But we're not quite Wal-Mart's bitches yet, especially in Canada. Let's just make sure we keep it that way.

The United States of Wal-Mart by John Dicker, Tarcher/Penguin, pb, 245pp, $18