The dust has settled from last month's ballot-box triumph of a determined band of San Marcos residents over their own City Council and mighty Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

It was a righteous victory. The big shots wanted to put a big box on top of a residential neighborhood. It was lousy zoning and bad politics.

But it would be a mistake to confuse the neighborhood interests of San Marcos with the broader issues raised by the retail giant's relentless expansion. Make no mistake: Wal-Mart is coming. And for consumers in North County and throughout California, the company represents our best hope of carving into the steep "sunshine tax" that makes almost everything more expensive here.

That's because the world's largest and most influential company is unfolding a strategy to introduce California shoppers to Supercenters, which combine deeply discounted groceries and gasoline with its traditional stocks of general merchandise.

Why does it matter that yet another ugly box is coming to the strip mall? Experts say that Wal-Mart's attack on California's dominant grocery and gasoline oligopolies will pour billions of dollars from lower prices into the pockets of consumers. They'll spend that money elsewhere, creating tens of thousands of jobs.

Supercenters stock 100,000 dirt-cheap items, including 30,000 grocery items, within hulking buildings that are typically twice the size of the discount stores in Vista, San Marcos, Oceanside, Poway and Temecula. The defeated project in San Marcos would have built a "small" Wal-Mart store. Company officials won't say when the first Supercenter will arrive in North County, but one was approved recently in Hemet, along with a string of them in the Inland Empire.

Nimble with zoning

The stores' giant size has spooked city officials concerned about traffic problems and suburban blight. But in January, apparently in response to local ordinances in California and elsewhere that limit new stores to 100,000 square feet, Wal-Mart opened a prototype Supercenter in urban Tampa, Fla., that measured 99,000 square feet. The prototype prompted speculation that existing stores may be converted.

Executives said last year that 40 Supercenters will be built in California over the next year or so. It's just the first installment. The announcement sent shock waves through the grocery industry, where firms controlling 65 percent of the market -- Albertson's, Safeway (Vons) and Kroger (Ralphs) -- immediately sought concessions from workers and sparked a four-month-long strike and lockout. Labor unions ramped up lobbying efforts to halt the expansion of the nonunion behemoth. Political activists, who blame the company for lost manufacturing jobs and suburban sprawl, joined the fight.

The opponents raise legitimate, if overstated, objections: Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Ark., has a 40-year history of wiping out competitors. It is China's largest export customer. Most troubling: Its zeal for cost-cutting has led to allegations that some managers routinely violate labor laws.

The heavy hand

And the company has sometimes run roughshod over local authorities and residents who stood in its way.

"I didn't start out to be an anti-Wal-Mart activist in any way, shape or form," says Laura Meyers, a San Marcos resident who helped lead the campaign to thwart the giant retailer in her neighborhood.

But as she got a taste of the company's tactics, which included filing lawsuits against the city, the developer and some residents near the proposed store, Meyers says she came to believe that Wal-Mart was evil. She says she won't be shopping at North County's first Supercenter, wherever that may be.

"'I'm not going to save money on the backs of somebody else," she said last week. "And believe me, I'm not a wild liberal."

Still, Wal-Mart's shortcomings contrast with the dramatic benefits for consumers when a Supercenter comes to town. Listen to the experts.

"They have an enormous impact," said George Whalin, a nationally prominent retail analyst based in San Marcos, speaking in an interview last week.

Vaulting to number one

Whalin guessed that Wal-Mart will work relentlessly to boost the number of Supercenters past 100 stores in California, supplementing its 145 existing discount stores. He points to Dallas, where the supermarket-discount store hybrid became the largest grocer in the metropolitan area in just a decade, drawing customers who drove for miles past competitors in search of bargains and one-stop shopping.

Such popularity is driven by Wal-Mart's tenacious discounting. In a 2002 survey by the investment firm UBS Warburg (now called UBS), economists found that prices at Supercenters were 17 percent to 39 percent lower than nearby rivals.

Another key finding was that prices paid by customers who never set foot in a Supercenter fell by an average 13 percent as competitors responded to the company's entry into the market.

In California's $60 billion supermarket industry, where Supercenters eventually are expected to capture at least 20 percent of sales in major metropolitan markets, such an effect on pricing will return billions of dollars to consumers. Because grocers in the state survive on profits of 10 percent of less, the impact already is causing the sort of panicked cost-cutting that provoked the recent strike.

And it's not just grocers who are worried. Whalin says that a Supercenter profoundly changes local markets for auto parts, liquor, beer, apparel, music CDs and DVD movies.

Cash for families

But the most important effect will be on working-class families.

According to a study funded by Wal-Mart and conducted by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., the average household in Southern California will save $542 a year if the company reaches 20 percent of the market. Savings would total $3.76 billion annually. Families will spend or invest that money, creating 36,400 jobs. Although the woes of competitors and downward pressure on wages will cost jobs, the study said that the regional economy will gain seven jobs for every one lost.

Then there's gasoline. Less certain, but perhaps even more important, is the tantalizing potential for Wal-Mart, together with competitors like Costco Stores, Vons and Albertson's, to force down prices at the pump.

"I think that from a consumer's perspective, this is purely good news," said Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California's Energy Institute at Berkeley and an authority on the state's gasoline industry.

Borenstein says that although six big oil companies control the state's gasoline industry -- the nation's highest-priced and most profitable for refiners -- the rise of big-box retailers in the gasoline business could inject competition and hold down retail prices.

With thousands of gas stations in the state, the oil companies have little incentive to discount prices. Slight disruptions in local refining operations routinely send prices soaring.

Clout at the pump

But a Costco or Supercenter store typically sells 300,000 gallons of fuel a month, dwarfing sales of surrounding gas stations. As the big boxes increase, they will gain clout with oil refiners.

Just as important is the enormous financial strength of Wal-Mart, which posted $259 billion in revenue last year and $55 billion in gross profits. Borenstein said the giant retailer could decide to import gasoline in large volumes, breaking the stranglehold that California's oil refiners have on the market.

"These guys can change the market in many ways," he said. "They are big enough to actually buy by the tankerful."

Such tactics would be vintage Wal-Mart. The company is famous, and notorious, for tireless attention to efficiency and for relentlessly badgering suppliers to reduce costs. It has mastered retail logistics, nearly perfecting the use of computer technology to monitor inventories, track shipments and to determine within hours whether a product is selling well.

One study estimated that Wal-Mart was responsible for 4 to 5 percent of the total rise in the nation's productivity in the late 1990s. No other single company had a measurable impact.

Passing on the savings

Most of this zeal for cost-cutting is passed along to customers -- much to the recent consternation of its shareholders. The stinginess also translates into low wages, an average of $10.75 an hour in San Diego County, according to a corporate spokesman. In this, Wal-Mart mirrors a disturbing trend that combines rising productivity with stagnant wages across broad swaths of the retail, service and manufacturing industries.

On balance, economists say that the lower prices effectively raise wages for everybody. On Wall Street, analysts are predicting that the giant, already incomprehensible in size -- it is the world's largest private employer, selling to 100 million customers a week -- is poised for yet another major growth spurt, and the smart money is betting it will overcome local opposition in California.

For North County, where prices for just about everything routinely exceed national and even statewide averages, it can't come soon enough.

Contact staff writer Dan McSwain at (760) 740-3514 or dmcswain@nctimes.com.