The expansion plans call not only for more stores, but more and various products to fill them up. If you think about it, is there really much of anything that Wal-Mart couldn't provide, if it wanted to, in its maniacal drive to expand its customer base?

When it gets right down to it, who's to say Wal-Mart couldn't become our main cradle-to-grave provider of just about everything? In fact, if you're into imagining extreme scenarios, if Wal-Mart started providing medical care and undertaking services, they could actually bring us into the world and take us back out again, while selling us everything we need in the interim.

If even joking about being sent off on one's journey to eternity by the funereal department of a Wal-Mart sends a chill up and down your spine, don't worry. It probably hasn't been officially spelled out in Wal-Mart's five-year or even ten-year plan. On the other hand, the day will inevitably have to come when Wal-Mart's growth slows down and its whiz-bang executives are racking their brains for new products and services to sell.

In recent years a debate has sprung up about the pros and cons of this giganto retail corporation we know as Wal-Mart. The arguments have become nearly as rabid as those that get screamed from either side of the abortion issue. Personally, I'm on the fence, leaning toward the negative.

It's not that the possibility of the country being commercially dominated by and pockmarked with thousands upon thousands of these ugly boxes is terrifying in some sort of horror movie-like sense. Instead, it's the idea that the country could eventually be transformed into a dismal and stultifyingly homogenous Wal-Mart nation and that nobody would particularly care as long as they could get everything they need at rock bottom prices.

I'm not calling for a boycott here, but if the prospect of Wal-Marts every five miles isn't exactly your idea of America the beautiful, you may want to consider buying most of your stuff elsewhere, before it's too late.

As for Wal-Mart in China, however — whatever it takes to deliver a knockout blow to Marxism.