Wal-Mart–the love ’em or hate ’em big box retailer — has managed to stretch a 97,687-square-foot loophole in a 75,000-square-foot Calvert County regulation aimed at limiting the ability of big box retailers to set up shop in historic town centers, according to the Post.

The regulation, passed last summer, hoped to save local small businesses, community living standards, and the environment from the pernicious and expanding commercial empire by restricting how big their stores could get — in this case, the cap stood at 75,000 square feet. Wal-Mart decided to skirt the limits by building two seperate stores altogether–a 74,998-square-foot store and a 22,689-square-foot garden center–and placing them right next to each other. The result — two Wal-Mart’s whose combined size exceeds the one-store limit by 30 percent — has aggravated local activists and forced a county attorney to consider new options to stop the store.

Wal-Mart — whose 3,600 domestic stores, 1,570 international stores, and 138 million shoppers a week netted them $256.3 billion in sales last year–has been beat before. New York City recently turned away the retailer, while Montgomery County and Prince William County have imposed restrictions similar to those in Calvert County. Last year D.C. faced the prospect of its own Wal-Mart, only to have company executives deem the Northeast site inadequate — though Wal-Mart’s interest in building its first store inside the Beltway continues unabated.

Wal-Mart has shown no bounds in its persistence on bringing its “Everyday Low Prices” to every corner of the country, something Calvert County planners may learn the hard way.