this is the kind of confused reasoning that has people thinking that if they "just do a little" then "it will add up to a lot". the basic problem is that you f

this is the kind of confused reasoning that has people thinking that if they "just do a little" then "it will add up to a lot". the basic problem is that you forget to shift frames when evaluating the significance of the sum. for example, you might have heard that if everyone would "just" unplug their phone chargers (when not in use) then we'd save millions (or whatever it works out as) of watt-hours a year and so help avert global warming. and it is indeed true that if everyone does something tiny and trivial (relative to a household's total consumption) like that it will add up to an amount that is much more than one household's consumption. yay! but to estimate the significance you need to compare it to the total energy consumption of the entire country. and then it becomes tiny and trivial again, and will clearly make no significant difference to global warming. similarly here - the total is way more than $20. gosh. but if you compare it to total turnover then it is a tiny percentage, which makes no real difference to the company. in short: big changes on a global scale require big changes on a local scale.