Last weekend, at the Wal-Mart in Quincy, the aisles were filled with scads of foodstuffs, cleaning products, appliances, DVDs, toiletries, undergarments, and shoppers from Boston scooping it all up.

One by one, the Bostonians professed their loyalty to Wal-Mart when interviewed.

''I do like Wal-Mart," said Bonnie Simmons, a 24-year-old nursing assistant from Roxbury. ''It's accommodating to my pocket."

Ivon Perez, of Dorchester, knows a box of Post Honey Bunches of Oats will cost her close to $4 in Boston and only $2.58 at Wal-Mart.

''You gotta do what you gotta do," said the 41-year-old benefits administrator for an animal protection organization.

Dorchester's Elisa Brown-Williams, a 45-year-old office worker at a package delivery service, was unabashed as she pushed a cart carrying Yoo-hoo.

''I love Wal-Mart," she said.

The intense bond between Wal-Mart and its customers is just one of the obstacles facing a group of community activists now starting to mobilize against a proposed Wal-Mart in Roxbury.

Another barrier: There is no Wal-Mart proposed for Roxbury. Not yet anyway. Which makes this case different from other face-offs across the country between Wal-Mart and neighborhood opponents galvanized against a concrete target.

Some here call it paranoia. Activists call it a preemptive strike. The campaign is in too early a stage to really call it a campaign.

Yet, next month, feeding off the rush of a national end-of-the-year, anti-Wal-Mart blitz, local activists led by the Jamaica Plain outpost of Massachusetts Jobs with Justice hope to launch the no-name offensive by gathering Roxbury residents for a showing of the documentary ''Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" and discussing the ramifications of a Wal-Mart in the neighborhood.

Critics have cast Wal-Mart as a nonunion enemy of working people that offers measly paying jobs with skimpy benefits.

And, they say, when you're dealing with the largest retailer in the world -- which posted $285.2 billion in sales in its fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2005 -- it's never too early to plot a wakeup call.

After all, in Providence, Wal-Mart critics said in interviews that they were caught unaware by the retail giant's plans to build there, and are now witness to a 142,000-square-foot store due to open in the fall.

''It takes a while; it's not an easy thing to do," says Diane Dujon, 59, a Dorchester activist who opposes Wal-Mart coming to the 'hood for fear that it will force residents who work there to find supplementary jobs to make ends meet, leaving families flat-out and splintered. ''They've already started on their side, and we're always playing catch up."

Like ancient diviners who practiced the art of foretelling by studying animal entrails, local activists say the signs of a possible Wal-Mart incursion into Roxbury may be subtle, but they're out there.

They see vast tracts of land on one side of Roxbury, and multitudes of people hungering for both jobs and low-priced commodities on the other.

They see an opening just created by the recent closing of three Americas' Food Basket supermarkets, two of them in Dorchester.

They've seen Wal-Mart turning to such urban frontiers as Los Angeles and Chicago after conquering rural and suburban America, with New York high on its radar. Boston, they figure, can't be too far behind.

And they see black icon Queen Latifah beckoning to shoppers of color from her throne as spokesgal for Wal-Mart -- the kind of diversity the company now touts after being the subject of allegations of racial and gender discrimination.

To hear it from Wal-Mart itself, the locals may not be too far off in their prognostications.

Last week, Philip Serghini, Wal-Mart's public affairs manager for the Northeast region, said: ''We're not considering anything in Roxbury at this time." But he added: ''That can change. . . . It may happen in the future. I wouldn't exclude it."

In an interview last week, Mayor Tom Menino reiterated his opposition to Wal-Mart, which he and other politicians and labor leaders pummeled last Labor Day after the company expressed fleeting interest in occupying the space created by the closing of Filene's downtown.

''I would do everything I can to prevent them from opening any place in our city," Menino said. ''They do not treat their employees to the standards I feel are acceptable."

Yet Serghini says he's seen city officials change their minds, and he wouldn't cross Roxbury off the possibles list.

''We are a growing company," Serghini said. ''A lot of people actually do want Wal-Marts -- even in Boston."

Company officials say Wal-Mart is a community asset that can spread prosperity well beyond the $2,300 a year they say a household saves by shopping there.

In Massachusetts alone, they say, 48 Wal-Mart outlets employ 11,608 people, with full-time workers bringing in an average wage of $11.26 an hour. In 2004, they say, Wal-Marts here paid more than $13.4 million in state and local taxes. And, they say, Wal-Mart that year directly contributed $1.7 million to local nonprofit groups.

But what the company views as charitable donations opponents see as chump change designed to curry a community's favor -- part of the ongoing he said/she said that plays out between Wal-Mart and its critics in things like dueling documentaries and websites.

Whatever Wal-Mart's selling, local critics say, they don't want it.

''What a Wal-Mart would mean for Roxbury is another large mega-entity coming into the community and pimping the energy, the resources, the labor of people who desperately want decent jobs, decent pay and quality goods," said Horace Small, executive director of the Roxbury-based Union Of Minority Neighborhoods, a social-justice, community-organizing group. ''But they're not good jobs, not union jobs."

They treat people, he said, ''very, very badly."

In forging a strategy to keep Wal-Mart out of town, Small and others say they will have to win the battle of politics over pricing.

''That's when you start asking the 'why' questions," said Jennifer Doe, workers' rights organizer at the Jamaica Plain office of Massachusetts Jobs with Justice. ''Why are these prices low? Because they're made by people who have little rights in China, working in horrible conditions, sold to you by people who make less than a living wage and don't have health care."

In a double-barreled rebuttal, Wal-Mart says critics are garbling their facts. Serghini says Wal-Mart can offer such low prices because it is ultra-efficient and drives out waste.

Further, he says, much of the company's goods are produced in the United States and those that are made overseas come via vendors who operate under strict standards.

As far as medical coverage, Serghini said, ''Every employee is eligible for health care."

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Daphne Moore added: ''I think we owe it to any community to identify the facts. People can disagree on Wal-Mart, that's fine. Let's work from facts and not make up scenarios that simply aren't true."

As local activists try to outwit the company, they say they hope to compress their focus: Scope out specific sites that might fit a big box, and organize against them. Rally small business owners who wouldn't be able to compete with Wal-Mart's alluring prices. Identify community leaders who might be natural Wal-Mart allies, from the civic to the religious, and win them over first -- or at least let them know that people are watching. Build a coalition between labor groups and residents -- one that would have to overcome longstanding tensions in Boston between unions and minorities -- that would have enough juice to go from pushing Wal-Mart to enhance its employment packages to picketing a possible Wal-Mart location to spreading the anti-Wal-Mart message door-to-door.

It was the latter strategy that helped opponents defeat a planned Wal-Mart in Inglewood, Calif., in 2004, after the company took the issue directly to the people as a ballot initiative after believing its path was blocked by city fathers.

Elliott Petty, a community organizer there, said the winning pitch he used one-on-one was: ''Don't let the largest corporation in the world come in and take over our city."

Boston activists say they are buoyed by the Inglewood victory, and feel any spectre of freedom lost will resonate here as well.

''It's all about fairness," said Small, a member of Jobs with Justice's executive board who also helped brainstorm the Inglewood tactics as head of a national group of black organizers. ''If ever a community perceived itself as being treated unfairly, it's the African-American community in Roxbury."

And yet, even some who've heard the Wal-Mart critique continue to shop there. The company says there's an extensive exodus of urban dwellers to suburban Wal-Marts, which they say undercuts the argument that a Boston megastore would drive out neighborhood shops.

''A lot of the small businesses are already competing with Wal-Mart," says Moore, the company spokeswoman. ''People in urban markets are Wal-Mart shoppers. They just don't have the opportunity to spend their dollars in their home city."

Bonnie Simmons, one of the Boston shoppers scanning the aisles at the Quincy Wal-Mart, said she'd welcome a store in Roxbury.

''It would be more convenient," she said.

Another, Elisa Brown-Williams, said she's so smitten with Wal-Mart she wants to pass the word about its sensational prices.

''I'd do a commercial," she said.

Back in Dorchester, Diane Dujon figures she could be a walking ad against Wal-Mart -- if she could walk, that is.

But the UMass-Boston staffer who wears her unionism on her sleeve -- actually, it's the theme of a sticker on her front door -- is off her feet with a broken ankle.

Dujon is out on sick leave as director of experiential learning at UMass-Boston's College of Public and Community Service. As she lay in bed with her left leg elevated on a pillow, she quipped: ''If I worked at Wal-Mart, I'd be out of a job."

Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com.

Smile or frown for Wal-Mart?

Would you want a Wal-Mart in your neighborhood?

Is the company unfairly picked on, or deserving of all the criticism?

Tell us what you think by e-mailing City Weekly at ciweek@globe.com. Please include your name, a daytime phone number, and your neighborhood or community. Responses may be edited for length and grammar.