Since America witnessed the courage of the firefighters on September 11th, "big beefy working-class guys became heroes once again", Mr Gary McGann, president and chief operating officer of the Jefferson Smurfit Group, told a lunch in New York yesterday. They had replaced "the telegenic financial analysts and techno-billionaires, who once had held the nation in thrall", he said. Mr Tom Coughlin, one of the big beefy guys sitting among the guests - who included several lean and unbeefy-looking firemen - applauded appreciatively.
Mr Coughlin likes to tell the story of how, when visiting a Wal-Mart store, an employee assumed he was a working-class guy whose job was driver for a Wal-Mart big shot, and said sympathetically: "I hear you have to haul one of the suits around with you today."
The joke was that Mr Coughlin was actually the suit who runs Wal-Mart. The president and chief executive of Wal-Mart Stores was guest of honour at yesterday's event in the Yale Club organised by Irish America magazine to profile its annual Business 100.
The son of a second-generation Irish-American cop with Mayo roots - his father was once grand marshall of Cleveland's St Patrick's Day parade - Mr Coughlin exemplifies the phenomenal success of working-class Irish Americans in penetrating the boardrooms of the United States.
"We were a have-not family - an Irish Catholic policeman with a family of 10," he said. "We weren't what anybody would refer to as wealthy, but we never saw ourselves as poor."
Mr Coughlin worked in the Ohio steel mills to pay his way through college and joined Wal-Mart Stores in 1978 at a time when the retailer had a mere 200 outlets. Today it has 4,600 stores worldwide and employs 1.35 million people, almost as large as the entire working population of the Republic. It is the largest employer of civilians in the United States, ahead of the US Postal Service, and ranks second in the current Fortune 500 top companies after Exxon Mobil, with projected sales in 2001 of $216 billion (€243 billion).
The company is so big and so focused on productivity that the McKinsey Global Institute said last month that improved management at Wal-Mart probably played a bigger role in America's productivity miracle of the late 1990s than all the expensive investment in high-speed computers.
Those who run big retail store chains like to cite their recipe for success. Mr Feargal Quinn, chief executive of Superquinn, quotes the Irish proverb: "Listen to the sound of the river if you are going to catch a fish."
Mr Coughlin says: "Stay close to the people you work with, no matter what their job is."
Now located in Arkansas, he travels three days a week in a company Lear jet to check out Wal-Mart stores and employees, known in the company as associates. When opening a Wal-Mart in the town of Severance, he noticed that the pictures on the wall were all of smiling Caucasians, though the customer base was African-American. "What a slap in the face to the people in the neighbourhood," he said. The murals were changed.
On another occasion, he asked 225 district managers at a meeting to operate a Telxon 960, a hand-held device used in the stores for tracking inventory. Only one in four could do it. A week later he repeated the test and all passed but for one, who "retired".
Everything is done in Wal-Mart to promote sales. Hallow'een candy is put out early so customers will eat it up and come back for more.
"Sam was a fanatic about talking to people in stores," Mr Coughlin commented, referring to Sam Walton, Wal-Mart's founder.
The culture of Wal-Mart, which includes conventions of store managers repeatedly giving the Wal-Mart cheer: "Give me a W..." and an abhorrence of trade unions, has given its critics much ammunition. They cite alleged environmental violations and a record of putting small stores out of business.
A lawsuit was taken in January claiming that the proportion of women in senior positions compared poorly with comparable US chains. The National Labor Relations Board charged Mr Coughlin with coercing employees illegally over union representation at the company's Kingman, Arizona store.
But what is extraordinary about the performance of Wal-Mart under Mr Coughlin's management is that it has bucked the economic trend since the attacks on September 11th. Where Mr Bill Gates was once avidly courted for his guru-type economic wisdom, the sultans of the old economy like Mr Coughlin are now courted avidly. As corporate profits and sales collapsed at other stores, Wal-Mart recorded a 6 per cent increase in September in its sales of food and commodities. It increased sales by 15 per cent in the July-September quarter and is stepping up its expansion plans for more superstores.
One reason is that what is bad for Americans is good for Wal-Mart, as consumers head for cheaper stores in hard times. At the Business 100 lunch yesterday, which was sponsored by Jefferson Smurfit, Mr McGann criticised the attitude that when an Irishman is told he has never had it so good the response is: "It can't last."
As epitomised by yesterday's main award winner, the phenomenon of Irish success in America combines such deep-seated fear of failure, with the slogan at the super-store chain's conventions: "We are Wal-Mart. We are winners. Winners win."
