I am a widow.Counsel: And what was your husband’s name?Grace: Grace.Counsel: What was his first name?Grace: It was always Grace. but perhaps it would make more sense if we heard what the lady herself had to say in court. A most extraordinary trial is going on in the High Court, which involves the Queen, a park bench, and an international conspiracy leading back to the Amazon rainforest It all started when Mrs Yvonne Grace … Better still: “You can also buy boxes of 30 Wal-Mart Movie DVDs for $240 each to re-sell at your own screening!” Mr Greenwald can teach us nothing about Wal-Mart, but Wal-Mart has certainly taught him.d.lawson independent.co.uk

More from Dominic Lawson. Or “get a 5-pack for $50 of DVDs and we’ll throw in free shipping”. You should, nevertheless, visit his film’s website (walmartmovie ) It has a store, advertising a DVD of the film for $12.95. I suppose that was his way of saying that he was never satisfied.Mr Greenwald is certainly good at expressing discontent, but it’s hardly divine.

The company now owns the world’s largest privately owned satellite network. In a very rare interview -Wal-Mart does not like talking to the press – its IT chief claimed that the company was governed by “divine discontent”. Wal-Mart was the first to develop the wireless bar-code, and through that it became able to learn what was happening in every inch of every store in real time. It no longer exists.If there is a secret to Wal-Mart’s remarkable success it lies in information technology. In the 1930s a chain called The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company was much more dominant in the US grocery business than Wal-Mart is today. The truth is very different – companies rise and fall, and only the most brilliantly run stay at the top for long. The US companies we should condemn are those who lobby Washington to increase tariff barriers against the Third World, not those such as Wal-Mart, who lobby for those barriers to be removed.I have the impression that many of those who feel most hostile to Wal-Mart somehow believe that running a business of such immense size is easy.

I’m not sure why a British viewer of Greenwald’s film would feel that Chinese workers were less entitled to the work than their American counterparts. I can understand why an American manufacturing trade union would find that objectionable. As the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter observed: “The capitalist achievement does not consist in providing more silk stockings for Queens but in bringing them within the range of factory girls for decreasing amounts of effort.”In America itself there is unease at the way in which Wal-Mart uses imports from China and Africa to bring down its prices. Given that wealth is just spending power by another name, it is clear – to me, at any rate – that Wal-Mart does more to raise the living standards of poor Americans than any government agency.

According to the market research company Global Insight the average American family saves over $2,300 a year because of the “Wal-Mart effect”.Obviously there is a much more significant saving for the low-income families who typically are the bulk of Wal-Mart’s customer base. Its prices are about 20 per cent lower than its competitors’, even though its very presence in the marketplace has the effect of driving down the prices charged by rivals. Wal-Mart’s profit margins are 3.5 per cent – a lower rate of return than many businesses which decide to close down. Wal-Mart’s business model is ruthlessly simple: to buy in goods at the lowest possible price and then pass on as much of the benefits as possible to consumers.