Wal-Mart saga ongoing.

A full-service Wal-Mart opened in Rosemead last week, just days before this recall election that could have overturned its permits. But that's certainly not going to be the end of the fallout for the retail titan and the community.

The super center, which is just less than 210,000 square feet, includes a McDonald's, pharmacy, vision center, hair salon, nail salon and full-service grocery that features Hispanic and Asian foods. The store also has one of Wal-Mart's largest lawn and garden centers in the country.

The site is a major beachhead for Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which only had two L.A. County superstores, in Palmdale and Santa Clarita. It didn't come without a fight.

Originally approved by a 5-0 vote of the Rosemead City Council in 2004, two councilmen were voted out the next year and replaced by Wal-Mart critics in March 2005. It didn't stop there. In this week's recall election, Mayor Gary Taylor and Councilman Jay Imperial, both of whom favored the store, face anti-Wal-Mart challengers.

This is familiar territory to the world's biggest retailer. In April of 2004, Wal-Mart lost a battle to open a super center in Inglewood and later that year, the Los Angeles City Council mandated that large retailers, such as Wal-Mart, conduct a thorough economic impact report before beginning construction.

Tracy Gray-Barkan, director of retail policy senior research analyst for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, said her biggest problem with the store is that workers make minimum wage and don't get benefits.

"Our opponents like to deal in rhetoric," said Ken Petersen, Wal-Mart Southern California Market Manager. "The facts show that our stores have been catalysts for community revitalization and new business."

Wal-Mart has said their full-time Rosemead employees start at $10.50 per hour, well above minimum wage, and pay as little as $11 per month for health insurance. Petersen said the company received 7,000 applications for the 500 jobs they had to offer and pointed to a series of Southland successes.

"In Palmdale, our super center sells flowers. yet a local floral shop owner is not bothered by our competition because she has an existing clientele and has a niche in floral arrangement that we don't provide. In La Quinta, the mayor boasted that no store had gone out of business in the year after we opened our super center. In South Los Angeles, the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza mall was virtually vacant before our store moved in. Now it's thriving. The mall was also just sold for $136 million. The previous owners bought it for $68 million in 1998."