When I stepped out of my car on Wednesday afternoon, the intense heat radiating from below reminded me where I was: Suburban Hell. I was visiting the Alexandria Wal-Mart on Route 1, which opened last October in a former K-Mart location. This is one of those new, smaller-size Wal-Mart stores: At just 80,000 square feet, it’s about half the size of the characteristic big-box. Yet it still stands surrounded by enough blacktop to pave K Street from one end of D.C. to the other. That’s something you notice on a hundred-degree day.
The ugly sight and the smell of tar brought to mind everything I dislike about Wal-Mart. The corporate welfare deals that have fueled its growth nationwide are the stuff of legend. Wal-Mart lobbies for self-serving causes inimical to free-market growth and competition — for example, in favor of Obamacare, and in favor of higher minimum wage laws, which in both cases will harm the company’s small competitors. Wal-Mart’s apparently transactional financial support for anti-business groups like the Center for American Progress (notice how they never dump on Wal-Mart, even when they give to Scott Walker?) should doubly enrage the small businesses with which Wal-Mart competes.
