Memo to city planners: you can't close all of the loopholes

Officials in Dunkirk, MD thought they had thwarted Wal-Mart's plans to build a large store. Last year they passed an ordinance limiting retail stores to 75,000 square feet. Wal-Mart, however, was convinced that public demand for their big-box store was there, so they found an ingenious way around the ordinance:

The company now plans to build two stores side-by-side at a site in Calvert County where plans for a single big store were thwarted by a size limit adopted last year.

Wal-Mart officials are calling it one of the first arrangements of its kind in the country.

The store and garden center in Dunkirk will have separate entrances, utilities, and restrooms. And the combined size of the stores will be 30 percent larger than the 75,000 square-foot limit for a single store.

This is yet another example of why the number of laws keeps growing and growing: local governments pass law after law regulating businesses and citizens, and those affected by the laws keep finding ways around them, which leads governments to pass additional laws to close the loopholes, which leads those affected to find additional ways around them....

Wal-Mart likes their idea so much, they are ready to use it wherever needed. How long do you think it'll take for Dunkirk (as well as other likeminded city governments across the fruited plain) to pass an ordinance prohibiting two instances of a retail business from opening within a certain distance of one another?