In a similar spirit, also launched this year, Wal-Mart Watch, initiated by the Service Employees International Union, is funded by a combination of labor, foundations and individual donors. Probably because it is not run by one union but is meant to coordinate -- and provide information to -- a vast coalition of Wal-Mart foes, the company seems more alarmed by Wal-Mart Watch, devoting an entire Web site to refuting its criticisms and attacking the group by name. Like Wake Up Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart Watch's staff has its share of Democratic political pros. There are petty turf wars and rivalries between the two groups, but what's striking is how potentially complementary they are.

While Wake Up Wal-Mart will probably be most effective in mobilizing union members, Wal-Mart Watch -- which hired four new people in the past two weeks -- may, because it is not solely a union project, reach a public "far beyond the organized-labor world," says spokeswoman Tracy Sefl. "We're able to develop strange bedfellows -- more moderate and conservative politicians, evangelicals" and investors. The latter may prove increasingly important: Wal-Mart's stock has been underperforming for some time, a fact many analysts attribute to what they call "headline risk," which is Wall Street-speak for bad press. That lagging stock price may become a critical pressure point for activists pressuring Wal-Mart to change its ways.

Another important thread in recent anti-Wal-Mart history is that for years, communities all over the nation have been fighting to stop Wal-Mart from opening new stores. Their reasons include their likelihood of worsening sprawl and traffic, the company's tendency to destroy downtowns by shuttering local mom and pop stores, its threat to union jobs and research showing that a new Wal-Mart actually increases countywide poverty rates. Wal-Mart Watch was founded in part to coordinate these disparate community efforts, to connect people fighting Wal-Mart in Vermont with people doing the same in Montana. Local battles have increased recently, and company officials admit that they've become an obstacle to Wal-Mart's growth. In the past year, Wal-Mart Supercenters have been emphatically rejected by communities as diverse as Upland, Calif., and Biloxi, Miss.

Wal-Mart has nearly saturated rural America, to the point where many of its stores are, in the graphic parlance of the retail industry, "cannibalizing" one another. To continue to grow, Wal-Mart must move into urban America, where it has been meeting especially intense opposition; cities have stronger unions and less space for big stores.

City dwellers are also more likely to be offended by Wal-Mart, sometimes for social justice reasons, as in the massive sex discrimination lawsuit, Dukes vs. Wal-Mart, the largest civil rights class action in history, which charged the retailer with discrimination in pay, promotions and training. Urban residents also often oppose Wal-Mart out of concern over low wages, or for snobbish reasons: Wal-Mart sells ugly, cheap stuff, brings more poor folks to the neighborhood to shop and doesn't belong in a cosmopolitan environment. It's also, compared with the lonely exurbs, or rural America, relatively easy to organize and inform people who live in cities: They have plenty of civic institutions and consume media avidly. To win them over, Wal-Mart may have to make changes.

Madeline Janis-Aparicio is the head of Citizens for a Better Inglewood and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, groups that last year blocked Wal-Mart's entry into Inglewood, Calif., a small city outside Los Angeles, by voter referendum despite Wal-Mart's determination. The company spent $1.5 million on the campaign. Now, she is fighting a renewed effort by the company to come to Inglewood. To Janis-Aparicio, the battle against Wal-Mart is not just about Inglewood. Striking at the company's growth is part of a strategy to get Wal-Mart to change: "We're not going to stop Wal-Mart in its tracks."

There are several reasons anti-Wal-Mart sentiment has so much resonance now. One has to do with the state of the labor movement. Workers are losing their benefits at the negotiating table while unions spend heavily on candidates, like John Kerry, who lose elections. Labor is desperate to stop losing, but its leadership hasn't agreed on what sort of change is needed -- indeed, right now, the AFL-CIO is in the process of splitting up. In this context, the future is murky, but Wal-Mart is a clear common enemy, and one that can help labor find the allies among the general public that it badly needs. Another reason for the explosion in organized anti-Wal-Mart sentiment is that it is George W. Bush's second term, and some people clearly feel that corporate interests in this administration are running amok.

The anti-corporate campaign, like those being waged against Wal-Mart, is a particularly contemporary form of activism. At its best, it is a flashy, media-savvy effort to tarnish a particular company's reputation, in hopes of provoking it to change its ways. This method of activism began emerging in the 1980s, when activists worldwide boycotted Nestlé for marketing infant formula in third-world countries, where unsafe drinking water makes breast-feeding the better choice. It became more popular in the 1990s, including the ongoing campaign to hold Coca-Cola accountable for its alleged complicity in the assassination of Colombian trade union leaders, as well as alleged abuses in India. It reflects the increasing importance of corporate image-making -- and thus, for critics, image-tarnishing -- but also an increasingly common despair about the ability to control corporate behavior through government regulation.

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