Anttention Shoppers

As investors, at least, maybe we should stop worrying about the consequences of a Wal-Mart opening near us and start worrying about Wal-Mart itself. Never mind that Wal-Mart-haters think the company represents a vast global conspiracy of greedy capitalists run amok (and they may be right). Just as the demonizing of the world's largest retailer hits its peak, Wal-Mart, as a company, may be falling apart.

As its tentacles reach every state and almost every municipality in the nation, Wal-Mart has become public enemy No. 1 for politicians, small-business champions, unionists, and journalists. You name it, Wal-Mart's been beaten up for it: low wages, shoddy benefits, predatory pricing versus mom-and-pop outfits, and an anti-union stance that makes Henry Ford look like a shop steward for the United Auto Workers. How hated is this company? Here in New York, the company announced in December 2004 that it planned to open a store on Queens Boulevard in 2008, but the strategy quickly drew fire from residents, unions, small-business owners, and local politicians. By February 2005, Vornado Realty Trust told city officials that Wal-Mart would not be part of its plans to develop a retail center on the Rego Park site. Word that the retailer was also looking at sites in Staten Island drew similarly swift opposition. In California, meanwhile, there's a bill making its way through the State Legislature that would force Wal-Mart and similar big-box retailers to pay the legal fees of any municipality that prevails in a lawsuit to block such companies from building a store. That's class warfare of a kind that we haven't seen in this country in 70 years. Can expropriation be that far behind?

To listen to the despondent Wal-Mart critics, you would have to wonder whether the Lilliputian consumers can ever defeat this retailing Gulliver. Don't be fooled. Wal-Mart's more of a Goliath than a Gulliver. And Davids are popping up everywhere. Wal-Mart, the once-venerated king of American retailing, has in the past year become Wal-Mart the pitiful helpless giant reduced by a collection of third-rate retail powers, if I may be so bold as to borrow language from