You spend a lifetime earning your money. You spend a lifetime giving it to suppliers. Here is what that looks like.
Every adult is, by the basic mechanics of modern life, a continuous funder of corporations. Pick a country. See what passes through your hands over your adult lifetime. See where it goes. See what it funds.
Will pass through your hands and into the supplier system over your adult life.
Based on average consumer spending in the United States, multiplied by sixty adult years. The actual figure for any individual varies, but the order of magnitude does not.
Your spending is not abstract. It flows in identifiable directions, to identifiable industries. Many of those industries are also the source of the problems you spend your life trying to solve.
Rent or mortgage. Heating. Electricity. Maintenance.
Most of this flows to the energy sector, which remains the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions. The same climate change that raises your insurance premiums and threatens your home was funded, in part, by your home.
Cars, fuel, insurance, transit, flights.
The second largest source of household emissions, and a steady funder of the global automotive and fuel supply chains, including their lobbying against the changes most buyers say they want.
Insurance premiums, banking fees, investment management, interest.
The institutions that price climate risk into your premiums while financing the projects that create the risk. The institutions that intermediate your retirement savings without consulting your values.
Groceries, restaurants, food delivery.
Industrial agriculture is the second-largest contributor to global emissions, and the largest contributor to biodiversity loss. The labour practices embedded in your food supply chain are decided by companies you cannot name.
Insurance, medications, appointments, hospital care.
Pharmaceutical pricing, hospital systems, and a data trail that follows every appointment. The same data that suppliers monetize is the data you are trying to keep private elsewhere.
Phones, devices, streaming, software, cloud services.
The platforms that monetize your attention, your data, and increasingly the development of your children. Every dollar funds the business model you are trying to resist.
Clothing, household goods, entertainment, personal care, services, and the thousand smaller transactions of an adult life.
The compound of all the relationships you never see: the cotton farm, the warehouse, the data broker, the payment processor, the third-party logistics provider. Each one a supplier. Each one currently writing your terms.
The numbers on this page are conservative averages. Your actual lifetime spend is likely higher. Either way, it represents a sum of money that, if directed through real terms and real conditions, would reshape every industry that touched it.
The framework that makes that possible is called Supplierism. The publication explains how, one case at a time.
Subscribe on SubstackLifetime spending estimates are based on average annual household consumption expenditure per adult, multiplied by sixty years of adult life. Annual figures for each country are drawn from that country's national statistical agency, supplemented by OECD household final consumption data and World Bank purchasing-power-parity adjustments where direct national data is incomplete.
Spending category breakdowns shown for the United States are derived from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey. Equivalent national surveys exist in most developed economies (Statistics Canada SHS, UK ONS Living Costs and Food Survey, Destatis EVS in Germany, Eurostat Household Budget Survey, etc.) and produce broadly similar patterns. For emerging-market economies, where consumer expenditure surveys are less granular, category proportions are estimated from World Bank and IMF household consumption data and may diverge somewhat from the structural pattern shown. Actual proportions vary by country and household.
The connections drawn between spending categories and broader systemic problems reflect a substantial body of research on supply chain, climate, financial, and data flows. See the data on the gap for primary sources.
The top suppliers listed under each category reflect representative leaders in each market by revenue, market share, or consumer footprint. They are not exhaustive lists. Markets shift. The lists will be reviewed and updated as the publication develops.
A note on this directory.
The eighteen-country supplier directory and its hundreds of brand profiles are a working sample of what the publication's directory will become. Brand inclusion is illustrative, not exhaustive, and indicates scale and category, not endorsement or criticism. Type, headquarters, revenue, and contact channels are best-effort and refreshed monthly as the directory expands and matures.
Errors, omissions, and corrections are welcome at hello@supplierism.com.