It’s not just a sale. Gift card money is invested and the company makes returns off of it, and all they have to do is provide you the base value of the gift card in coffee or whatever at some later date. Plus, if your purchases don’t add to a whole number, millions of gift cards with like 30 cents left over in each of them is a ton of free money for the company. Gift cards are a huge scam

Although, electron affinity is a thing… so the analogy does break down pretty quick. Rip

I’ve never really liked the anthropomorphic description of chemical bonding, but maybe it’s actually similar to the addition thing. On the one hand, we can say 9 wants to resolve to 10 and takes a 1, and on the other hand we could say there are a bunch of different ways we could rearrange these numbers but the end result is the same as if we resolve 9 to 10 first. Maybe chemical reactions are similar, so there’s a bunch of configurations that could have happened, but the end result is the same as if we had said fluorine wants that last electron

The second method is very chemistry-like. I do that too naturally