More-mart

From Grist Magazine, on the impossibility of a green Wal-Mart:

In January alone, Wal-Mart opened 70 U.S. stores.   At current growth rates, by 2015 Wal-Mart will have enlarged its domestic footprint by 20,000 acres, turning CO2-absorbing fields and forests into stores and parking lots.

Big-box stores make incredibly inefficient use of land. While 200,000 square feet of retail spread over several two-story downtown buildings with shared parking takes up about four acres, a single-story Superstore of this size, with its standard 1,000 parking spaces, consumes nearly 20 acres.

That's a lot of balloon-landing.

... It is not as though we need these stores. Between 1990 and 2005, the amount of store space per capita in this country doubled, while consumer spending grew at less than half that rate. The predictable result is that the U.S. is now home to thousands of dead malls and vacant-strip shopping centers. City planners are not the only ones alarmed.

"The most over-retailed country in the world hardly needs more shopping outlets of any kind," advised PricewaterhouseCoopers in a report to real-estate investors.