Wal-Mart stock is currently selling at its lowest price in five years after reporting sluggish sales growth this week that barely keeps pace with inflation. Its stock value is down from its peak (reached in April 2002) by nearly 33%. Its prospects are poor. It may have become the giant retailer we know today during that inexorable rise to become the world’s biggest retailer, and then the world’s biggest company, in the 1990s. But since 1999, Wal-Mart has been flat.

There are two chief reasons for this, according to a consensus of analysts. One is that Wal-Mart is a victim of its own success: it has so thoroughly saturated the rural and suburban market for cheap goods and food that little further growth is possible, especially in its home market, the American suburban family.

Another, more dynamic reason, is related to the surging price of oil, which has more than tripled over the period of Wal-Mart’s stall. As Daniel Popowics, a stock analyst, told The New York Times this week, Wal-Mart “stores tend to be somewhat more remote” outside the suburban areas, “and there’s a cost in terms of a person’s time and perhaps fuel now to get there.” The rising price of gasoline has taken a direct hit on the number of customers coming through Wal-Mart’s doors, as well as the number of trips their customers make in any month.

The long-range corporate plan is to launch new stores closer to customers, inside urban areas. But that strategy has its problems too. Land values, civic tax rates, and labour costs are higher in urban areas, factors that threaten Wal-Mart’s chief appeal as a purveyor of the cheapest goods.

Another negative factor may also come into play soon: analysts have concluded that the reason why North American Wal-Marts perform better than European Wal-Marts serving customers of the same demographic and economic profiles is because the average North American comes with a larger cargo-carrying space: the back of their large SUVs. Wal-Mart announced plans this month to boost sales growth by burdening each of its fewer visitors with a greater number of purchases. But as Ford and General Motors know all too well, much fewer North Americans are buying the large SUVs. A trend toward smaller vehicles may hamper Wal-Mart’s ability to sell more goods to those fewer customers.

While none of this means Wal-Mart is going out of business any time soon, it does mean that the company will behave increasingly desperately to meet its investors’ expectations. It must soon boost its stock price, which has lingered in a flat line for over seven years. To do so, it must increase revenues and cut costs to leave a fatter profit margin for share-holders who are tiring of stock that doesn’t grow in equity. To achieve higher revenues in an environment of fewer customer visits, smaller vehicles, higher fuel costs and a saturated suburban market, it must invade urban markets in a big way. But it cannot enter urban markets and still maintain its pricing and cost-structures unless it hammers away at labour costs and civic tax rates, and it cannot win new customers in already well-served and highly developed urban settings unless well-established competition dwindles away.

Vancouver is one of Wal-Mart’s first serious forays into its new urban experiment. Its long battle over the course of two different City Council mandates to win a zoning reversal on Marine Drive, allowing for Highway Oriented Retail zoning in a strip between Cambie and Main Streets, is a model for what the company expects to encounter in every urban centre on the continent. The company has succeeded so far in buying off the Non-Partisan Association and securing the votes of councillors Peter Ladner, Suzanne Anton, Kim Capri, B C Lee, and Elizabeth Ball, as well as Mayor Sam Sullivan, who all favoured the zoning change that allows Wal-Mart to bust into the Vancouver market. Those are the civic leaders who hope Wal-Mart establishes its new, urban, small-business-destroying, labour and civic tax-rate-crushing model for the coming decade right here in Vancouver—and their names should be noted for it.

There is still a council vote upcoming when Wal-Mart formally proposes to construct a store on Marine Drive. That is when Vancouverites will get another look at who among their elected councillors is interested in using their seat on council to look after the future of small business, low-paid workers, and a fair civic-tax policy, and who among them doesn’t care about these things.