Boone Says Whoa to Big-Box Retail

It's not in today's Watauga Democrat, probably because the Boone Town Council action was only last night, but the council voted to limit big-box retail in the town to 150,000 square feet ... the approximate size of our existing Lowe's hardware.

As council member Dempsey Wilcox said at the meeting, for a town the size of Boone, that's plenty big enough.

Not big enough, however, for the Wal-Mart corporation's "SuperCenters," which were not, as a matter of fact, singled out in any way by the language of the ordinance.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is busily getting involved in politics ... even faster than we predicted down-column ... by sending out 27,000 "fact check" letters to its employees in South Carolina (an early Democratic Party primary state in 2008) attacking what those Democratic presidential hopefuls have been saying in Iowa about the negative impact of Wal-Mart on local economies.

Now ex-Sen. John Edwards, and the rest of those guys, will not only be running against El Presidente's incompetence and the Republican Party's monopoly on power but also against the largest single private employer in the nation.

Who thought it was going to be a net plus to attack Wal-Mart in a national political campaign? Not at all the same thing as dealing with "super centers" on the local level.