Retail wonders of the world: Surely you've shopped a few Ever stood in line at a major retailer and contemplated all the sales in even one business day? If so, consider this: Receipts at the world's 250 largest chain stores were $5.7 million a minute, or - if you prefer - $95,000 per second, during the latest period for which data are available. That's what global accounting giant Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, in conjunction with STORES magazine, found in compiling a list of megaretailers. The biggest of the big, based on revenue, was Wal-Mart Stores of Bentonville, Ark., which has about 6,400 outlets worldwide and reported more than $300 billion in sales revenues for the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2006. The world's largest retailers with the home country of each:There's a discernible pattern here, of course whereby a corporation whose governing offices are embedded in the national economy of one country by various means are sucessfully operative also in many other countries (where presumably those operations are also subject to that/those other/s/'s laws).
1.) Wal-Mart Stores ..... US - I've never been in one - E
2.) Carrefour SA .................... France
3.) Home Depot .... US - great store; one near my home Canada
4.) Metro AG ......................... Germany
5.) Tesco PLC ........................ Britain
6.) Kroger Co. ....................... US - Never
7.) Target Corp. .................... US - Never
8.) Costco Wholesale Corp. ........ US - Never
9.) Sears Holdings Corp. .. US - Customer both US and Canada
10.)Lidl&Schwarz Stiftung&Co .. Germany
The subsidiary companies operative in other countries do not necessarily obey all the laws to which the mother company is held in the home country. This creates many problems, and provokes not only protests but also a juridical gap. There is no effective global law by which all mite be held accountable equally in a systematic economic way.
Update (Apr29,2k7): Noticing that all the top-ten listed are not online retailers, and using the common distinction between "brick-box retailers" and "online retailers" to establish two different subsectors of retailers, let's add an eleventh company not anywhere near the top-ten of the overall retail-sales sector. Our candidate is Amazon.com which is indeed very active internationally from its US hub with subsidiary companies in many other national economies, and plays a significant role in its sector as part of the global economic order. This insertion also allow us to anticipate and prepare for material in our next blog-entry:
11.) Amazon.com .... US - I'm a customer
Now, let's return to our original text for this blog-entry:
[For convenience, let's shift from the term "mother company" to "holding company" by which only Sears on our list designates itself.]
There is no effective systemic global economic law for the global economic order. Rather, binational and multinational treaties provide frameworks for out-of-country powers of the holding companies often subject only at home to the home country's laws, in many cases. Contracts are entered-into between companies in different countries, but it is often difficult for outsiders to those companies themselves, including the outsider-bureaucracies and law-enforcement agencies of the states involved, to determine where actually policy-making authority and agreements are actually concluded, from company to company, at the holding company level or the subsidary company level.
In passing, I note that Roman Catholic subsidiarity theory seems to offer no particular guidance or rationale for relations within companies operating under various guises on various levels of the global economic order. It remains to be seen whether Dooyeweerdian legal theory can offer uniquely any further lite on these problems around its contrasting theory (actually, priciple) of sphere specificity (sphere universality, sphere sovereignty).
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