A 0.1 percent decline in November same-store sales at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) was not what the market wanted to hear on the first trading day after black Friday, judging by the approximately 1 percent decline in the S&P 500. But there’s no reason to assume Wal-Mart’s fortunes have any relevance beyond the company itself.

In response to a market worry nearly a year ago, we published a column suggesting Wal-Mart’s struggles were entirely due to its own situation and had no bearing at all on how retail as a whole was doing. Let’s review how things turned out for retail investors, and for Wal-Mart shareholders, over the past 12 months.

Wal Mart stock is down 5.1 percent. That’s certainly not bottom-of-the-barrel.

The Home Depot, Inc. (HD) and Lowe’s Companies, Inc. (LOW), impacted by the housing slowdown, are off 11.1 percent and 10.1 percent respectively. Wal-Mart’s recent aggressiveness on generic-drug pricing contributed to 15.1 percent decline in Walgreen Company (WAG), and concerns over spending have helped clip 11.8 percent from the price of shares in Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) over the past 12 months.

But there have been other places where retail investors did quite well despite the scare Wal-Mart threw into the market a year ago.

American Eagle Outfitters (AEOS) is up 97.2 percent; CarMax, Inc is up 56.3 percent, GameStop Corp. (GME) is up 55.0 percent, Sears Holdings Corporation (SHLD) is up 48.1 percent, and J.C. Penney Company, Inc. (JCP) is up 49.4 percent.

The average share price change for the top 50 retailers, based on market capitalization, 14.65 percent, was considerably better than Wal-Mart’s 5.1 percent decline. Among all the 274 retailers in our U.S. stock database, the market-capitalization average 12-month share price increase was 8.7 percent.

As goes Wal-Mart, so goes retailing? Not quite. We’ll stick with our Jan. 6, 2006, assertion that “as goes Wal-Mart, so goes Wal-Mart.”