Just what we need, another Wal-Mart. It makes no CENTS

Just what we need, another Wal-Mart. ☺

Wal-Mart is assembling another one of its Big-Box businesses in Lawrence, Kan., despite the fact that there already is one on the south side of town that people can drive to within a few minutes.

I'm not a big fan of Wal-Mart. I go there if I have to, but it's never on impulse like it is for a lot of people.

A friend of mine once suggested that Wal-Mart is such an intrusive part of our day to day lives that we might as well just slap a roof onto a community and allow Wal-Mart to supply it with everything: electricity, water, housing, health care.

Wal-Mart has a Stepford Wives quality to it. It stamps out that trendy top you like a million times, so not only can you wear it, so can everyone else.

Wal-Mart's reputation is based on its low prices, but at what cost do those prices come?

First off, Wal-Mart provides poorly packaged health care plans for its workers by maintaining strict restrictions on who can qualify.

Some people suggest that this isn't such a big deal because a lot of Wal-Mart's workers are college students who haven't established themselves professionally. But what about the other workers, like the single mothers paying for rent and daycare?

They're paying for the low prices that Wal-Mart offers.

Worth $18 billion, the Walton family’s wallet keeps getting fatter and fatter. They own Boardwalk and Park Place, as well as the green, yellow, red and orange properties, while the rest of us can barely afford to rent Baltic Avenue.

But life, unlike Monopoly, is not a random game of chance. We don't have to roll the dice to determine whom to do business with. We get to decide. But as long as people plunk down their credit cards and dish out the dollars, Wal-Mart will keep growing. And growing.

And growing.

Where does it stop? For me, it stops right here as I decide to just stop shopping there. What do you think?