Is Keeping Wal-Mart Out of a Community 'Class Warfare'?

"The town of Hercules, California, has upscale aspirations and its vision of the good life rules out a Wal-Mart store.

Similarly, three Maine towns are considering a "box-free" zone to prevent Wal-Mart from opening in an area of coastal New England known for its colonial charm, an idea mirroring wealthy and quaint Nantucket's recent ban on chain stores.

The city council of the mixed-race bedroom community of 23,000 east of San Francisco voted this week to invoke eminent domain to block Wal-Mart Stores Inc. from building a 99,000 square foot (9,200 sq meter) store near the town's waterfront.

Wal-Mart is no stranger to hostility. In a garden variety instance of opposition fueled by union activism, officials in Oakland, California, another San Francisco Bay area city, had tried to bar big-box retailers altogether because Wal-Mart aimed to enter their market.

Wal-Mart faces a different and more confounding source of anger in Hercules -- a 'class war,' according to Roger Pilon, a legal affairs specialist at the libertarian Cato Institute. 'The people in Hercules are coming across as looking down their noses on those who shop at Wal-Mart, as not wanting 'those people in our neighborhood,'' Pilon said.