Every time I go there, I feel like I have entered a war zone. Mothers with screaming children wait at the service desk like refugees in line for their food rations. Shoppers squeeze past half-filled shopping carts down crowded aisles lined with debris. Palettes of merchandise obstruct the main aisles like cargo left behind along the Oregon Trail. In the parking lot, vehicles maneuver around customers hauling off carts of loot. The omnipresent smiley face is eerily reminiscent of the ubiquitous paintings of a tyrant found plastered on every public wall in personal dictatorships. Even the shelf tags are engaged in psychological warfare, chanting “always low prices” in perfect unison.

I hate shopping at Wal-Mart. I could blame it on my childhood. For reasons that are still unknown to me, I was denied three things while growing up: trips to Wal-Mart, McDonald’s Happy Meals, and Little Debbie snacks. Fortunately, I was recently able to acquire a taste for Little Debbies. Still working on McDonald’s.

You can imagine my fury when a new Wal-Mart was built less than a mile from my house in my hometown. Wal-Mart had the audacity to chop down a dozen or so harmless, defenseless deciduous trees and build the ugliest retaining wall I have ever seen in my life, all so that another Big Box Behemoth could sit like a fortress, lording over the intersection of 132nd and L Streets. Not only that, but the Wal-Mart’s erection also spurred road construction on surrounding streets, greatly impeding my weekly pilgrimage to Target.

I swore to myself that I would never shop at that commercial monstrosity. And boycott it I did … until last winter break when I found myself in need of 600 feet of Saran Wrap at 1:30 in the morning. (As to the reason why I needed such a large quantity of Saran wrap in the middle of the night, I plead the Fifth.)

It seems that being a Wal-Mart hater is in style. Everywhere, citizens are protesting new Wal-Marts, city planners are rewriting zoning guidelines to keep Wal-Mart out of their towns, and trial lawyers are filing suits on behalf of customers who slipped on cough drop wrappers.

I fear the anti-Wal-Mart crowd may be taking the issue a little too far, and as the founder of the “Target is Far Superior to Wal-Mart” thefacebook group, I can’t help but wonder if I am partially to blame.

Personally boycotting Wal-Mart is legitimate, but limiting the ability of others to shop there is illiberal in the extreme. So-called “community advocates” presume to speak for the people when they tell Wal-Mart to stay out of their community, but how can that be reconciled with the fact that Wal-Mart does a huge amount of sales in the same communities where it was told it was not wanted?

Let’s not forget how Wal-Mart became the world’s largest corporation. It cut prices of merchandise, making up for low prices with volume. It began in rural areas where the selection of goods was limited and the price of goods was high. Mom and Pop might have been nice people, but in the absence of competition, they charged as high of prices as they could get away with. For people in rural areas, the presence of a Wal-Mart had the same effect as an increase in income — it increased their purchasing power.

Wal-Mart may not pay high wages either, but it provides jobs to the unskilled, the uneducated, the elderly and to people with abnormal hours of availability or who can only work for a few months at a time.

It should come as no surprise that those who have time to protest Wal-Mart are not the same people who desire to shop or work there. They have the time and money to shop at more expensive specialty stores and to worry about poor landscaping, traffic and tasteless architecture.

So keep on shopping at Wal-Mart if it pleases you. Watch out for those smiley faces, though. They jump out at you from nowhere.