I would suggest a strongly-, but politely-, -worded e-mail to WalMart corporate headquarters documenting which store, when, and what happened.

Actually, if you contact the manager of your local Wal-Mart (via phone or email) and ask for a good place for bicyclists to put their bikes inside somewhere then they will most likely take action. Me and some friends went to Wal-Mart one time and the door man was reluctant to let us put our bikes inside, but we asked for the manager and he came up and we asked him if we could park them in the inside cart area and he agreed and there has been no problem with it since.

It is no surprise that Walmart would be bike-friendly.

Walmart is the biggest seller if bicycles in the USA, and I am willing to bet they are the biggest seller of bicycles in the world.

Walmart being bicycle friendly is like an automobile dealership being car friendly.

Wow, this is quite the zombie thread!

I would only give money to Walmart at gunpoint. I used to just dislike them until they moved in and destroyed the town I grew up in. Now that they've run all the other stores out of business, there's massive unemployment there, nowhere else to work without travelling 30+ miles (with $4/gal gasoline), and you either shop at Walmart or you have to travel 30+ miles for any other store.

I admit that I go into that store if forced; it's that or take 2 hours out of my family visits to go buy some dumb thing 40 miles away. But I try to do without.

Walmart has certainly accelerated offshoring though. Having Walmart sell your goods is a trap. It's the best thing that could happen to you - you'll grow like crazy. Then, every year, they're going to demand that you lower the price. And you will have to, because you can't afford to lose their business. Eventually you'll have cut all the fat you can from your domestic operations, and they'll still come back and demand more. At that point, you'll be firing your domestic employees no matter what you do; tell the "no" and lose so much business that you have to close down or drastically downsize, or move offshore.

It's happened to many manufacturers.

Walmart makes a good show of being US friendly, but like most companies, they're pretty ruthlessly just going for the bottom line, even if it means moving jobs to asian slave-labor camps. They don't do it directly of course, but they force others to do it.

Most of what they sell are not really bicycles, but bicycle-shaped pieces of scrap metal. They fall apart after a couple of months and can't be repaired.