Big Box Panic

My essay, "Is Walmart really more evil than Google?", may be of
interest: http://mathoda.com/archives/184

In Michael Moynihan's article "Big Box Panic," he seems to be
taking the position that we have no more to fear from the Big Box
stores than our predecessors had to fear from the advent of any
chain retailers. He asserts, quite legitimately, that retail trends
come and go and before too long the current retail heavy hitters
will be replaced by someone else, perhaps even a return to
small-scale retail. What he fails to take into consideration is the
irreversible collateral damage that these huge concrete vacuum
cleaners wreak on small town America. Big cities may well be able
to outlive their Big Box incursions; but small towns are never the
same after Walmart gets its hooks into them. I live in just such a
small town and we are facing an effort by an out-of-town developer
to locate a 160,000-square foot Walmart on a tract of our scarce
prime agricultural soil, just beyond the limits of town in the
newly designated "growth center" at the interstate exit of the
neighboring municipality. Not only does this bode ill for an
organic family farm located just 3-tenths of a mile away from the
proposed site; but in a county that has barely more than 10,000
individuals, as store that size is devastating to the local economy
and will forever change the culture of the community as it empties
the downtown. I wish we could afford to just let it happen for all
the folks who want cheap stuff right now; just wait for the natural
cycle of its decline; but that's not really an option here. We are
therefore engaged in an epic legal battle to challenge the
developer's permit. It makes us extremely unpopular with a lot of
people who aren't interested in the long term impacts; but we are
determined that the laws that are in place to protect the
traditional downtowns, the environment and the viability of our
communities will be upheld.