The Wal-Mart Effect
In a McKinsey Quarterly article (subscription required):
Who would have expected the retail sector to be a big part of the new-economy story in the United States? Retailers seemed to have been left out of the technological and operational improvements that transformed US manufacturing. Yet retail-labor productivity growth more than tripled after 1995, contributing roughly one-quarter of the national productivity acceleration of 1995–99. The reason can be explained in just two syllables: Wal-Mart, whose operational innovations—including the "big-box" format, "everyday low prices," electronic data interchange with suppliers, and economies of scale in warehouses—forced competitors to adapt.