You buy a coffee. Four dollars. You tap your card and walk out.
Somewhere in the two seconds that took, roughly nine or ten cents got peeled off and distributed to companies you never chose, never thought about, and probably could not name.
Giphy
Nine cents. On one coffee.
Now multiply that by every card transaction in America, every day, forever.
That is one of the largest, most durable, most invisible businesses in the entire economy, and it is built entirely out of amounts too small for anyone to notice.
This article is about that pattern, wherever it appears. And by the end you will be able to spot every place it is operating on you.
Let us open it up.