Wal-Mart's fans and foes: towns may be ready or not for retail giant.

• Author: Peterson, Eric

To some, Wal-Mart is like the ogre in the "Lord of the Rings" movie, a club-swinging giant that extols capitalism's worst vices, squeezing suppliers, exploiting employees and crushing every Mom-and-Pop that stands in its way. It also has little to say for itself. The Bentonville, Ark.-based behemoth rarely responds to its critics, and it never apologizes for its steady conquest of the nation's discount-retail market.

Now the largest employer in the nation (about a million employees in 3,000 stores)--and in Colorado (nearly 20,000 workers in 56 stores)--Wal-Mart is enjoying success in the midst of a lukewarm economy, and setting its sights on what it sees as numerous untapped markets around the state.

"Over the years, our customer base has expanded and broadened in Colorado," said Wal-Mart Manager of Community Affairs John Bisio. Expansion in the state "has been a matter of keeping up with the growth and the changing needs of our customers."

Regardless, when Wal-Mart starts sniffing around, blood starts to boil.

When it opened in 1996, the Wal-Mart on the outskirts of Evergreen was the target of a grassroots boycott, complete with flyers featuring the mooning of five bare-bottomed "greeters" with their backs to the camera. In Fort Collins, nearly five years of controversy preceded a referendum passed in 2000, allowing Wal-Mart to build a Supercenter on the city's north side.

But Wal-Mart does not always prevail.

A group of Longmont residents fought a proposal earlier this year for Wal-Mart to abandon its existing store for a much larger Supercenter--and won, And plans for a Wal-Mart anchor for a Far East Center redevelopment in central Denver were met with such a loud outcry that the deal collapsed almost immediately.

Two potential new Wal-Mart locations on the Front Range--in Boulder and near Monument--have generated oodles of argument. In both instances, opposition began to mount at the first utterance of the company's name.

But no two cases are exactly the same.

In Sterling, officials point to the local Wal-Mart, which opened a decade ago and expanded to a Supercenter in 1995, as a key to turning around a once-moribund economy "They draw from a large geographic area," said City Manager Jim Thomas. "I see license plates from Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming."

"Sterling has really benefited from (Wal-Mart)," said Terry Sanger, president of the Sterling Economic Development Board. "Competition is always a concern, but you know what: Times have...