That is the cash purchaser paying the retailer more than they need to. There's no conservation law stating that store revenue is a constant and missed revenue from one customer must be made up for by another, nor that every additional operating cost must be directly pushed onto customers.
Similarly, we do not say that October shoppers transfer wealth to Black Friday shoppers, even though the only tangible difference from your scenario is an irrelevant temporal one.
> I guess I've been living outside of the US for way too long
If you're the kind of person to invent new definitions to fit statistics and then cry about the fabrication's implications then perhaps it's better for Americans if you keep living abroad.
> Food insecure—At times during the year, these households were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
They don't count the additions or shifts because they're both linear time operations, and thus provably at least as fast as multiplication (both in an asymptotic and exact sense). In any case where multiplication is super-linear, this means that addition and shifting are are not the temporal bottleneck at any stage in the algorithm where you have a constant number of those operations surrounding at least one multiplicative recursive call (on numbers of similar magnitudes).
If additions were truly free, an even easier optimal algorithm would just be repeated addition involving zero multiplications.
