Read Online Priceless: The Case That Brought Down the Visa/MasterCard Bank Cartel by Lloyd Constantine - Free Book Online

toward this day for years and had a draft complaint almost ready to file. However, it was nearly a year later—October 25, 1966—when we filed the Merchants’ case. During that year, C&P began to learn what it would be like to represent Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart,
The Double-Edged Sword

    N OW WITH THE active litigation over, I can see how important Wal-Mart was to the effort. It was at once our biggest asset and our biggest challenge. Representing them was frequently a pleasure and honor but often as difficult as opposing Visa and MasterCard and, at times, more difficult, painful and frustrating. All of that is clear now, but at the beginning I saw neither how important Wal-Mart would be, nor how difficult. I really didn’t see it as being any more important than the other big merchants I represented. That had to do more with my ignorance and Manhattan tunnel vision than with reality.
    As of November 1995, when Steve Hunter, Wal-Mart’s payment director, contacted me after reading the antitrust analyses I had written for The Limited, I had never been to a Wal-Mart store. There weren’t any in Manhattan (or, indeed, anywhere in New York City), where I was born, raised my three children, and will call home until I die. Eliot and his wife, Silda, were fans of Wal-Mart, buying all the stuff for one of C&P’s summer outings at the Wal-Martin Kingston, New York. So I finally went to a Wal-Mart in 1998, two years after we filed the Merchants’ case, and then only because I thought it prudent to visit the stores of each of our clients and personally inspect the checkout areas where they accepted payment. When I finally got there, I quickly realized what all the applause and boos were about.
    I don’t need to describe what a Wal-Mart looks like, how low the prices are, or the appearance and demeanor of its sales associates. Most of my readers will know and knew about this before me. However, my experiences during that first visit to a Wal-Mart stayed with me. One thing that favorably impressed me was the large number of variously disabled workers. The second was the palpable devotion of Wal-Mart shoppers.
    While there, my wife Jan and I bought an upright vacuum cleaner and a folding table with four chairs. At first, we couldn’t select a vacuum cleaner because they were all so inexpensive that despite the name brands, we doubted their quality. Another shopper, sensing our confusion, literally took us by the hands, helped us find a very good machine, and delivered an unsolicited, but heartfelt, commercial for Wal-Mart. She told us that Wal-Mart allowed her family to live a better life and have better things in their home than they ever had before. She said her daughter had asthma, but that with the excellent Eureka vacuum that she had purchased at Wal-Mart (and persuaded us to buy), her daughter’s attacks were less severe. We found the folding table on our own, the kind that stores four chairs inside, folds up, and rolls on its own wheels. Two decades before, we had purchased a similar table from Hammacher Schlemmer for $500. It was a nice, serviceable piece, made with wood veneers, and had fallen apart after many years of use. Twenty years later, at Wal-Mart, we were buying a better, sturdier, solid-wood version for $120. Everything else about Wal-Mart is as simple and as complicated as that.
    The low retail prices are not merely the product of the low prices that Wal-Mart pays its suppliers and the low wages it pays its employees. Wal-Mart systematically eliminates excess costs from every step in the distribution chain. They are not hypocrites, unlike so many other companies I have encountered. They walk the walk. Rob Walton, Sam Walton’s son and Wal-Mart’s chairman, works in a small, windowless office. When I started visiting Wal-Mart’s home office in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 1997, the entire corporate headquarters contained only one conference room, called the “Quail Room,” which proudly displaying Mr. Sam’s