美英报刊阅读教程Lesson 25 课文.doc

Lesson 25 The Success of Wal-Mart Wal-Mart is America’s largest corporation, the service economy wears the crown By Cait Murphy 1. How did a peddler of cheap shirts and fishing rods become the mightiest corporation in America? The short version of Wal-Mart’s rise to glory goes something like this: In 1979 it racked up a billion dollars in sales.1 By 1993 it did that much business in a week; by 2001 it could do it in a day. 2. It’s a stunning tale-one that propelled Wal-Mart from rural Arkansas, where it was founded in 1962, to the top of the FORTUNE 5002 this year. Sam Walton, Wal-Mart’s founder, pushed sales growth relentlessly while squeezing costs with sophisticated information technology.3 He exhorted employees to sell better with quasi-biblical precepts like the “ten-foot rule” (greet customers if they are that close).4 He was, in other words, an early evangelist for the first commandment of today’s economy: Service rules.5 3. Wal-Mart, in fact, is the first service company to rise to the top of the FORTUNE 500. (Before 1994, FORTUNE listed service and industrial companies separately, but no service company was ever larger than the top industrial ones.) When FORTUNE first published its list of the largest companies in America in 1955, Wal-Mart didn’t even exist. That year General Motors6 was America’ s biggest company, and in every year that followed, either GM or another mighty industrial, Exxon7, was No. 1. 4. Wal-Mart’s achievement caps a bigger economic shift8-from producing goods to providing services-that’s been happening for years. Manufacturing’s share of U.S. employment peaked in 1953, at 35%. It has been declining steadily since. In the decade that will end in 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics9 figures that goods-producing industries (brawny work10 like mining, construction, and manufacturing) will create 1.3 million new jobs, compared to 20 million for service industries. To look at it another way, today there are about four times as many peopl