Move to Cary?

Your answer suggests a misreading of republican democracy, founded to balance concentrated power -- be it royal or corporate in nature -- with that of the relatively less powerful.   Surely you would agree that such decisions as opening a Costco demand an open, honest, and accurate discussion of perceived costs and benefits by all concerned.  Otherwise, such decisions are left to the political class, and outsiders welding raw corporate power.  They have millions of dollars at their disposal, while we have only our ideas, questions, and values more complicated than pleasure, convenience, and low prices.  So much for democracy if such decisions, with their profound and permanent impact -- on people, land, sewage, and trash -- lie beyond the influence of mere citizens.   We're too close to losing honorable, engaged, and independent news media to abandon public debate.   Granted, all communities evolve, but the best do so in terms of place and people rather than abjectly surrender to landscapes dictated by automobiles and remote corporate boardrooms.    We can do better.

I like your thoughtful, specific comments, and figure it'll all work out about the way you figure.  The Crown site might work, but traffic flow is already awful in that location, and I don't think the powers that be would stop at one Costco.  I doubt that one Costco would reduce taxes significantly, if at all.  It seems to me that most excess capital around here is sucked out and sent elsewhere, some of it returning in the hands of developers trying to make a fast buck, often in the name of greeness.  Governments are left to play cleanup, and they often have their own wasteful, short-view agendas.  Nonetheless,  when I have to visit a big store I usually head to the Hillsborough Walmart , which, given the traffic around No Hope Commons,  takes about the same amount of time from northern CH and Carrboro -- and whatever tax is involved stays in the county.  I'm as implicated as anybody, but I never forget that a healthy community is akin to a biological system with its completeness.  Money circulates among its citizens, value grows.  On the community level, big box stores, as key purveyors of consumerism, are the main place where our lives intersect with, and participate in, the evils of extracting, exhausting and wasting.  Things are taken from one place, never to return, processed in a second and, after a brief period of use in a third, increasingly end up in a fourth community's dump -- or literally downstream.  There's a lot of ruin in there, mostly unobserved by us consumers.  In a healthy community, as on a healthy farm, there's greater balance -- and little to no waste.   Ignoring this fundamental reality of nature constitutes real short-term thinking.   Even the most ardent consumerists must admit that sooner or later things wear out, but they need to understand that it's not merely blue jeans but arable land, mines, seas, and the atmosphere -- and there's no way to go out and purchase new ones.  I think many people, left and right, believe that science and technological advancement will save us, but I think that constitutes, as Wendell Berry writes, the greatest superstition of our time.   I know that changing the consumer ethos of our culture is formidable, but where better to begin this conversation than in a place where educated people are so concentrated?   Or, indeed, is the problem, at heart, one of educated people?   

Your response is certainly wise and moderate, the best possibility I can imagine given the options and the seeming inevitability of this sort of "progress." But what is to stop the very thing you fear, the proliferation of these areas -- not merely one store as they always come in clustered sprawls it seems -- along highway 54 west or 15-501 south? I question it in all areas, you support it in a couple of places, and many people (who may well be on their way to somewhere else that has all the stores they've been convinced to desire as our economy promotes store branding to counter the pervasive rootlessness it demands) would be happy with it anywhere so long as it's not in their particular current neighborhood. 54 west and 15-501 would be just fine with them, and then they'll move on and leave us with, in a few years, grid-locked suburban wasteland characteristic of northern New Jersey, northern Virginia, and just about every other metro area it seems. When I complain about traffic, people from such areas laugh -- and often add "you should see what I left. This is nothing." But it's coming, there's no doubt, if we invite it. I remember being in a beautiful New Jersey town some twenty five years ago, along a street of lovely homes, and hearing the loud, unending roar of traffic on a nearby road and suddenly realizing, as if I'd been hit in the head, "This is what East Franklin Street is becoming, will be."  

It's not quite there yet, but it's close.