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The impact of the entrance of a WalMart into a metropolitan area, especially a relatively small one, has been controversial for many years. The controversy springs from the typical economic growth versus community culture argument con-cerning the “inevitable ” loss of many treasured small retail establishments.1 This article examines this issue within two different contexts. The first extends the existing statistical studies of this impact along the lines of Sobel and Dean (2008) but using county-level rather than state-level data. The second uses a case study that focuses on a small metro-politan area (Muncie, Indiana) that already had a significant number of big box retailers and a regional mall before WalMart opened its first store. We plan to exploit the open-ing of individual WalMarts in certain Indiana counties to establish clusters of counties that fall within easy driving dis-tance of a particular WalMart. This permits the analysis of the effect of a WalMart entrance on other local businesses within the county as well as in adjacent counties, a frequent question addressed in earlier studies. Our results indicate that contrary to conventional wisdom, the biggest impact of the entrance of a WalMart in a locality is on other big box stores or malls, not on mom-and-pop retail stores. Literature Review The examination of the impact of new forms of retailing on local retail establishments has a long tradition—beginning, perhaps, in the late 19th century with the introduction of mail-order giants such as Sears, Roebuck and Co. In the 1920s and 1930s, these studies expanded to cover the impact of chain stores (F. W. Woolworth, W. T. Grant, Ben Franklin, and others). Studies of malls and discounters were a natural continuation of earlier studies. By the 1990s, estimating the impact of a WalMart’s entry into a local retail market had become a bit of a cottage industry. The threads in this agenda include measuring a WalMart store’s impact on the price level of retail goods; its impact on existing, especially mom-and-pop, retail establishments; and its impact on local wages, employment, and working conditions and on the local social structure.