So to clarify your position, your annoyance with anti-Walmart sentiment is that it rests on the appeal of mom-and-pop stores, small economic units, vs. a large company that might have many small outlets. You do recognize that physically, big-box megalomarts are totally incompatible with a Euro/NYC urban layout, aside from locations in city centers and outlying shopping districts in the middle of highrise housing estates that are well served by public transportation (as an example of modern development, eg those common in the Czech Rep. and I suppose elsewhere in E. Europe). If that is your position, it did get hard to discern in those banzai charges of yours.
So are there *any* examples of a large retail company being compelled by planning authorities to provide the smaller outlets familiar in Europe? As far as I've ever seen, planners do that (or maybe get to do that) only in the sort of wealthy areas where residents are allowed a little central planning and contraints on property rights for their own benefit. A wholesale lack of examples would suggest a deeper problem in the results of urban planning than "a potential for abuse".
Suspicion of urban planners in the US is not grounded on just naive populism -- it's also from painful experience and irreversable damage to city centers and neigborhoods that have wiped away existing opportunities to create the European city life you (and I) yearn after. Chicago's Dan Ryan expressway, the central arterty in Boston, Robert Moses's deliberately making arteries in NYC impassible to busses -- these are some of the notable accomplishments of urban planning in the US. There's a reason for jokes about urban renewal in Fallujah, and it's not populism. That's not to say that sane urban planning is a physical impossibility -- there are plenty of good examples I've seen, even in the US-- but the suspicion of it, particularly as a giveaway to private developers, has good half-century of broken promises behind it.
-- Andy