By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 13, 2006; C01

PLANO, Tex. -- The world's first high-end Wal-Mart has grocery aisles nearly wide enough to drive a Volkswagen down. Pushing a cart around the store makes you feel like Cinderella, or Cinderfella. Cartoon tweety birds should follow you. You think about hating Wal-Mart. You think about loving it. Wal-Mart thinks about you, a lot. Wal-Mart knows that you know that Wal-Mart knows that Wal-Mart is a ravenous beast. The brain's ticker on Wal-Mart news never stops scrolling: Wal-Mart to open stores in blighted cities. Wal-Mart defies Christian bully pulpit, stocks "Brokeback Mountain" DVDs. Wal-Mart wants to open banks.

Wal-Mart has a $557 bottle of wine.

The corporation calls this high-end store on the windy prairieburbs a one-time experiment, a laboratory box store set among the beautiful box stores north of Dallas. "Please don't think," the company's U.S. division head, Eduardo Castro-Wright, said in a news release when it opened late last month, "that this is the direction that we're taking. This is one of the many tests that we're running to understand how to deliver better value to customers."

But all you can do in here is think -- about life, about taste, about commerce and the little moments where you know they've got your number. The place was designed, Wal-Mart officials have said, to drive women wild, and at the same time appeal to men with a certain retail savvy. It is, as one executive told the press, a Wal-Mart for people who aren't much for yardwork and wouldn't dream of changing their own oil. Instead, you talk to these customers about the $18.64 bottle of EVOO. (Which is foodiespeak for extra-virgin olive oil, which you would know if you were in touch with your inner Rachael Ray.)

You could kill a day here, and we do. It is a Thursday, late morning. We exit the North Dallas Tollway and prepare for an altogether different Wal-Mart, hoping to see a whole new America. Most of the store's 200,000-plus square feet of floor are a polished, earthy-colored concrete. In some departments -- fashion, linens -- the floors are blond hardwood.

We snack on rosy red sashimi at the sushi bar and surf the free Wi-Fi in the cafe. We get our hair did at the SmartStyle, where a stylist tells us how, once the salon part of the store was finished, it was deemed unworthy of the distinct look Wal-Mart was going for in its attempt at upgrading its image. "They ripped everything out and did it over," she says, motioning to all the pale wood and track lighting. "They wanted to do everything right."

When you want the world to know you've changed, say it with cleaner graphics. The employees have been liberated of their blue smocks, and talk (twitchily, though) about how happy their newfound khakiness makes them. There is no Wal-Martish Muzak playing, but there are flat-panel displays suspended from the ceiling here and there, and always seem to be playing a Jack Johnson music video. (Jack Johnson, that barefoot surfing troubadour, is a love drug for suburban moms. Jack Johnson could take you away from all this.) Somehow, all day, you never hear a squealing toddler; just this low, soothing hum of a store breathing in and breathing out. There's never a wait at the registers. (Can we move here? Live in the parking lot?)

* * *

In this store, Wal-Mart is working out some of its Target envy (vaguely Euro), along with a smidge of Whole Foods envy (it's in how you stack the organic vegetables), and a lot of Best Buy envy (the gizmofication of everything). Who knew that the most successful retailer of all time -- so admired, so successful, so adored by senior citizens and immigrants and 6-year-olds yet so reviled for its perceived soullessness -- could evince so many neuroses about self-image at once?

Time passes, loitering around the world's nicest, newest nowhere. The shoppers here frequently say, in the sweetest Texas drawls, "Excuse me" and "Ooops, I'm sorrrrry" when their carts are even remotely in your way. So we bump into them sort of intentionally. This might be our very favorite thing of all: the infinite politeness. They've all read their Joel Osteen. They're all living purpose-driven lives.

And we're all being watched. It is, after all, the nascent week, the Grand Opening, and around every aisle there seems to be another group of casually dressed Wal-Mart executives from Planet Bentonville, muck-a-mucks, regional this or that. The men wear pressed pants and polo shirts and badges on lanyards; the women are Ann Taylorish. They whisper to one another -- what do they whisper? Leaning closer, pretending to need the conditioner on the bottom row, we find that they're talking about the ceiling. It's beautiful, Wal-Mart Woman says to Wal-Mart Man.

* * *

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.