Yeah, That's Pretty F-in' Big...

I'm still in Texas, and I took a look at the local Super Wal-Mar today. Really took a look. From the inside. No, I didn't get a job there, not that kind of 'inside,' I was grocery shopping with my mother. I noticed how much wider the aisles were than in the stores I visit in SoCal, and yet how people just as easily managed to get in one anothers' way. I kind of idly wondered just how many customers would fit inside. So I looked at one wall, then squinted across the store, past the curve of the Earth, to see the far wall. The far, far, far wall, off in distance, lost in the mists of the store's microclimate.
   Holy crap, that place is huge. Ungodly huge. Ridiculously huge. Unnecessarily huge. Obscenely huge.
   It looked to me that, wall-to-wall, the store stretched at least 100 yards across. As big as football field; and I mean real football, American football, not 'futbol.' But I thought to myself 'self, you must be losing your ability to estimate distances, it can't be THAT big.' So I looked it up on Wikipedia. The average Super Wal-Mart is 197,000 ft sq. Which, if you assume a square footprint, comes out to 443 feet on a side. I was wrong, a football field is 100 yards across, or 300 feet, 360 if you include both end zones. The Super Wal-Mart would be 147 yards across, on average, or 47% longer than the Cowboys' home field. That's 136 meters if you prefer to measure things like Europeans do.
   Hokey smoke, that's just insane. I know things are bigger in Texas, but Texas isn't the only place that has Super Wal-Marts. Chances are good the biggest one isn't even in Texas. How much electricity does that place use? How much water? How much gasoline do all those people burn getting to and from that immense building every day? How many people surreptitiously cut a fart while walking down one of those fifteen-foot-wide aisles? That's greenhouse gas right there.
   I'm not into granola and I don't wear hemp clothes. I'm not a green fanatic by any measure. But just thinking about the simple statistics for what it takes to keep this one Super Wal-Mart open is enough to turn me into a tree-hugging, polar bear-loving hippie. And then when you think about all the other Super Wal-Marts across the country... man, I'm starting to long for a Volkswagen Microbus that I can take into the forest and get away from it all. Jeez, how much do we need, and how big a store do we need to put it all in? Enough, already.
   Where's my tie-dye? I need to make some clothes.