[commonsense]

By no means am I "Tree-Hugger" or anything close, but the only thing I can remotely object to from WalMart, and other huge stores like the HomeDepot/Lowe's Wars is this---If you're not already aware:

That, in a very general ecological sense, or simply hating egegious waste, their business model/tactics do have some avoidable temporary detrimental environmental results:

These companies are so huge and their national profits are determined by the national average, so they can afford to build two huge stores (in the case of Walmart) close enough together (driving distance) in order to drive-out smaller stores in-between, when staying put with the one would little jeopardize losing business to the smaller stores. The two large Walmarts basically divide the pie, splitting serving the same clientele, doubling their "overhead" until they decide which store will do better, sacrificing one of them after the trial period.

Walmart will also do this to drive smaller places under in a larger region, in the hopes that once they're the "only game in town" or more often "in the county" then they'll secure much more of the business in the entire area.

Of course, this is part of a cycle which has mixed results because once "main street" becomes deserted, rents will go down, and a new crop of entrepreneurs will have a crack at fulfilling consumer needs/desires of personal service or quality that even the best-run Superstore can't provide.

Actually, leftists who view themselves as "for the common people" should welcome this because it allows greater numbers of people to become more wealthy, replacing long-standing "dynasties" of established family businesses that no longer are as hungry or have become inefficiently-run but still linger for generations. We can all think of local examples...

Of course, if "leftists" were truly "for the common people" they wouldn't be leftists, but that's another story.

Back to my slight "ecological" argument:

When HomeDepot puts one of its stores very close to another of its own stores for the sole purpose of "driving-out" a huge competing nearby Lowes's in a war of attrition, both stores may operate for a long time without profitability because one wants to remain in business and secure all the future trade from being once again "the only game in town" and calculates the years of lingering as being made-up for in the long haul.

Walmart also does this against Target in regions where a customer could easily drive to the nearest WalMart passing a Target Store if he wanted to shop at WalMart, but Walmart doesn't want to risk him stopping at Target instead.

Again, I only cite these as remotely objectionable ecological factors because here in my area, there are two Home Depots five minutes apart, with Lowe's in between! There are two Walmarts twenty minutes apart with a Target in between, and twenty minutes more to the next Target, which is also another twenty minute's driving away!

As a business model, I guess nationally averaged-out it makes sense, and only if you fail to look at the benefits of all these huge stores close together providing plenty of immediate employment, and the longer cyclic dynamic for providing entrepreneurial opportunity,
does it appear "ruthless" and "bad" .

But once these behemoths from the store from the losing company or the one of the two from the same company that was "sacrificed", which were usually newly built on fresh landscapes, vacant land, or worse, picturesque farmland, eventually gets torn-down and rebuilt, there is an unrecoverable loss of environment that's pleasant to look at, presumably some negative impact on soil runoff, etc and eventual overcrowding when the developed-then-redeveloped area becomes a hideous townhouse development.

Libertarians are often confused as being anarchists, but this is wrong. What we oppose is the illegitimacy of the redundancy of Federal control when issues like this are caused by local govt's clamoring to meet inefficient, not to mention unconstitutional mandates from centralized control for funds sucked out of the hapless taxpayer that in effect destroy his environment locally indirectly by planners in Washington.

Both local and federal governments are at fault.
Mixed-use zoning prevents much of this environmental phenomenon I describe, instead of the "suburban sprawl" which the morass of local/federal laws create.