My, you certainly do have opinions about Wal-Mart.

Last week, in a column headlined, "Why do people get worked up over Wal-Mart?" I wondered how the retail giant could, on the one hand, make people upset enough to lead public campaigns against it (Hercules, Calif., recently voted to condemn property Wal-Mart owns to keep it from building), while, on the other hand, it could be so popular that 84 percent of Americans admitted to shopping there in a recent Pew Research Center poll.

It was, I said, the type of store Karl Marx would decry "before slinking inside to buy a cheap DVD player." I guess I pushed some buttons. Here is a sampling of your responses:

John Nunes, who said he read the column while scanning the nation's papers online, described Wal-Mart as hypocritical. "Competition isn't un-American, Wal-Mart is. Remember Wal-Mart's '90s slogan, 'Bring it home to the USA. Buy American'? . . . At the same time, they were buying over 60 percent of their products from overseas manufacturers (now 80 percent), and forcing their remaining U.S. vendors to outsource to foreign countries or lose Wal-Mart's business. . . . Doesn't seem to inspire much trust or respect when millions of Americans have been lied to for the sake of profit."

Jordan Swain wasn't afraid to vent his political feelings, which go far beyond choosing a favorite retailer. "You mention Karl Marx a few times. I honestly don't understand who the h— you think you are to insinuate that such a genius would be so shallow as to pattern his own shopping habits after those of common American society. Marx was a person with ideals, and I think that looking towards such an individual's example is worth more than any low price that Wal-Mart, or any other bourgeois corporation, could provide."

Wayne Rout read the column online in El Paso, Texas. He's not totally pleased with Wal-Mart but sees something political in the opposition. "Wal-Mart is Southern based but has good family values and generally donates to Republicans. The liberals just can't stand Wal-Mart because (it treats its) employees so well that they don't have a union. Democrat legislative bodies all over the country have made Wal-Mart a target because of these things. Wal-Mart is one of the major engines that has kept inflation under control."

Another reader who asked that his name not be used touched on the union issue, as well. " . . . few people cared about Wal-Mart before two things started to happen: 1. The store started to sell groceries, and 2. the store moved out of the South and into the North and West." Most grocers in the North, he noted, are unionized.

Jim Fikar of Sandy said he is a veteran of the unsuccessful fight in that city against a zoning change to allow a Wal-Mart near a neighborhood. "My distaste is for their arrogance in forcing/urging local leaders to alter zoning restrictions to allow them to build a huge, all-night store in local neighborhoods. . . . I know it passed a citywide vote, but if you ask the locals that a mega store impacts, the vote would've been a landslide in the other direction. . . . The general public is feeling the 'Little people' syndrome in national and state politics. We'd like to think we had a say in our immediate community government, but it doesn't work that way with Wal-Mart."

More of you called or wrote with variations on the theme that I "just don't get it" or that I haven't done my homework — sentiments so common no matter what I write that I find them sort of comforting.

But for the most part, this week's mail showed that Wal-Mart is far from just another competitor in the nation's retail firmament.

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Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret Morning News editorial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com