More than half of all Americans live within five miles of a Wal-Mart store, less than a ten-minute drive away. Ninety percent of Americans live within fifteen miles of a Wal-Mart. On the nation’s interstates, it is rare to go a quarter hour without seeing a Wal-Mart truck.

Wal-Mart now has 3,811 stores in the United States (including 10 in Alaska and 9 in Hawaii); that is more than one Wal-Mart store for every single county in the country. The stores are so large that they do not fade into the landscape the way that Starbucks and McDonald’s do. The stores sit on vast aprons of asphalt parking, usually .at a slightly different grade from the nearby roads, so they look dug into the ground or popped out of it. Wal-Mart stores aren’t just big inside; they present big, flat planes of concrete - sides and roofs - which catch the eye because they are out of scale. You do not pass a Wal-Mart without noticing it. The stores have a gravitational force, bending the land, the circulation, the rhythms of the communities where they are planted.