Andrew Leonard's piece pondering Wal-Mart's success is unrevealing. Of course shoppers flock there for perceived bargains, and even occasionally real ones. But that's only one component in the phenomenon. Consider:

You are a 2-1/2 jobs household with revolving credit debt, struggling to meet your family's medical and other bills. So, yeah, you try to be thrifty, and you buy into the widespread meme of Wal-Mart's low prices. [Not necessarily THE lowest; after all, the Federal Trade Commission ordered the firm to stop saying that.]

You might even be willing to burn gas to the next town if there's no Wal-Mart in your own, which is why your city fathers are desperate to attract a local store and are willing to give this rich, fat company huge cash and tax incentives to set up shop -- generating a local media spectacle of free advertising of the kind that made Krispy Kreme Donuts a nationwide craze.

Unfortunately, as Leonard alludes, the short-term gain to consumers comes at the cost of long-term hurt to their communities. The tragedy of this commons is that Wal-Mart arguably drives out well-paying jobs by forcing down prices and wages beyond its own operation.

The consumers who shop Wal-Mart may well be making a rational economic choice. But that's only true in a narrow context, because they do not have, as economist Milton Friedman would say, perfect information about the full impact.

For example, Wal-Mart shoppers may well be subsidizing the chain through their state taxes, which pick up basic health care services for Wal-Mart employees who do not get coverage through their mini-wage jobs (an effect already documented in Wisconsin and perhaps elsewhere). So are those apparent low prices really so low? Nope.

It's a race to the bottom, an economic Third World in the making. And when a Wal-Mart location doesn't make enough profit, the company abandons its big box for a more tempting location, perhaps in a neighboring city. Whether it stays or leaves, your main street may die.

We could blame the consumer for taking the bait, but in Wal-Mart's case that metaphor is not quite right. It's more a case of consumers as dolphins, snared as they seek a cheap meal in a deadly gill net.

The Wal-Mart strategy isn't sustainable on any level. The firm will eventually wipe out its customer base by killing their communities and helping to make them collectively poorer. And yet the firm persists because its short-term success is all investors care about.

In short, Wal-Mart is selling the cheap rope with which it will one day be hanged.

Arguably, then, the Wal-Mart model is as much the fault of Wall Steet and its myopic priorities as it is the thriftiness of lower income shoppers. In focusing only on the shoppers, Leonard forgets that we're all in this together.