There is an object you have seen ten thousand times and never once looked at.
It is behind the grocery store. It is stacked outside the hardware store. It is under every crate in every warehouse in the country. Somebody in your neighborhood has three in their yard right now and is planning to build a coffee table out of them.
A wooden pallet.
Two decks of boards, a few blocks between them, forty eight inches by forty inches. Cost of materials, somewhere in the range of a nice dinner for two.
Now here is the part that should genuinely surprise you.
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There are hundreds of millions of pallets in circulation in the United States. Some estimates put the number near two billion. The vast majority of everything you own spent part of its life sitting on one.
Your mattress. Your washing machine. Every can in your pantry. The lumber in your walls. The drywall around it.