I'm trying to understand the hatred Wal-Mart seems to generate.

Up and down this country, there are few stores that can mobilize massive protests or get people to attend city council meetings more efficiently. There are, conversely, few stores that can get those same people to throw on a pair of jeans and a dirty T-shirt and go on a shopping spree more efficiently.

It is as if American-style capitalism has finally reached its logical extension — a place Karl Marx would denounce in the vilest terms before slinking inside to buy a cheap DVD player.

I have a neighbor who jokingly refers to Wal-Mart as "Darwin's waiting room." But that description has more to do with the type of people one encounters in the store at 2 a.m., when the aisles are still brimming with activity and checkout lines are still long, than to any threat the store poses to other retailers.

What I'm trying to understand is the type of venom that led the city of Hercules, Calif., recently to use the power of eminent domain to condemn a piece of land Wal-Mart owns so that it couldn't build near the city's waterfront — an act Marx certainly would have supported.

I'm also talking about the type of hatred that has led thousands to oppose Wal-Mart's efforts to charter itself as an industrial loan corporation here in Utah, so that it can offer credit cards, debit cards and electronic check services in its stores. This has led to a strange coalition of groups that traditionally have been fighting against each other, such as banks and realtors.

And how many of them shop there secretly?

Late last year, the Pew Research Center released a poll it conducted on public attitudes toward Wal-Mart. It found that 84 percent of Americans had shopped at one during the past year, and 81 percent said it was a good place to shop.

On the other side of the equation, however, 34 percent rated the store as a bad place to work, and 69 percent said they had a favorable view of the company. That figure puts Wal-Mart lower than McDonald's and Microsoft, two other corporations that have been known to raise fears.

Clearly, we're conflicted on the subject.

The hatred all seems to revolve around the same argument, which was summed up nicely by Hercules resident Anita Roger-Fields, who told the San Francisco Chronicle that Wal-Mart "is the worst thing that could happen to our community. They want to crush the competition."

This column is not an endorsement of Wal-Mart. It's frankly not my favorite place to shop. But I'm wondering when crushing the competition became un-American? Isn't that the whole idea behind a free-market economic system? Isn't competition supposed to lead people to innovate, invent and find new ways to give customers what they want at a low price, and doesn't it do this because the alternative to being innovative and inventive is to go out of business?