In Texas, the Biggest Box Gets Mighty Fancy Trimmings

Wal-Mart is testing the waters (mineral) as well as wines (French), cheeses (imported) and olive oil (extra-virgin) with its upscale new store in Texas. (By Jason Janik -- Bloomberg News)

Wal-Mart picked perhaps one of the sweetest spots in the national retailscape to throw shoppers a curve: Collin County, Tex., embodying everything both dreamily enviable and vaguely unnerving about modern paradise. The average home here (almost always red brick, with soaringly pitched shingled roofs)tops 4,000 square feet; a Wal-Mart executive claims the average household here earns $145,000 a year. Across the North Dallas Tollway from this Wal-Mart is a Hummer dealer, a Saab dealer and a Costco. There's a Baptist church down the road big enough for 26,000 members, which nevertheless is thinking about expanding its congregation to a site farther north.

You can be completely accustomed to the idea of the suburban landscape -- blase about massive box stores and brand-new gated communities. You only think your suburb has it all, or has too much. You haven't been to Plano. Developers are fond of the word "node," that sweet spot where retail, dining, living and traffic patterns coexist in perfectly planned grids and swirls. Plano is all node.

Joan Didion once said the only thing she missed about California was the grocery stores. Perhaps she never pushed a shopping cart in Texas, land of the designer supermarket wars, which is where the Whole Foods empire started. (Whole Foods fails these days to elicit huge thrills among Texas foodinistas; what they all want now is something called Central Market, a higher-end gourmet paradise conceived by the H.E. Butts chain in the 1990s in Austin and spread to Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth and, of course, Plano.)

The high-end Wal-Mart claims to have 2,000 grocery items not previously available to its shoppers, most of them organic. That's a lot of different kinds of balsamic vinaigrette. It also has a one-carat $2,984 engagement ring. It sells a $3,477 high-definition plasma TV, and on it they are showing "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," the creepy 1971 version, begging for ruminations on excess. But soon enough we run out of dazzle. Thread counts in the bedding aisle max out at 250. The mind wanders toward something that screams Wal-Mart: a contraption that grills a chicken atop an open beer can, for beery good flavor.

And in the long, long aisle that is the wine department, there are four bottles of La Mondotte 1999 Comtes de Neipperg selling for $557.47 each. They are on a short, kiosk-type wooden shelf near an aisle-long cooler of beer. (The good beers, but also the bad.) On the other side there's a '98 Dom Perignon ($145.37), and several other wines in the $100 to $300 range.

You could just stand and watch the La Mondotte all day, as people discover it, and give it a brief gaw. Many of them are actually looking for it, having seen it on TV during a flurry of opening-day coverage. ( Y'all hear about that $500 bottle of wine they got at that new Wal-Mart in Plaaano?) Mothers forbid the picking up or fondling of it -- "Don't you put your hand on it," one scolds her kid. Friends giggle over it. A teenage girl reads the label intently and informs her mother that it's French.

But nobody is a hick about it. Nobody in the high-end Wal-Mart passes judgment on it, or haughtily proclaims that no wine is worth $557. They admire it and continue their shopping as if it had always been there.

On the way home we pass the Wal-Mart that closed, the old one, the ugly one. "What was it like," asks a friend, at dinner, about the big new one. It was nice, we say. It was like being in a very nice Wal-Mart for eight hours. It was the nicest noplace we've seen in a long time.