If you visit the Wikipedia entry for "fine print," you'll see the image above as an example. Fine print -- basically, noticeably smaller words on a document -- is typically used to disclose all the legalese without diverting the consumer's attention from the important part. The image above is a great example for two reasons. First, it demonstrates the dichotomy well: "free chips and guac" is the message you want the consumer to take away from the card, and stuff like "cash value 1/100th of one cent" is something that the lawyers made the marketers include, but the consumer doesn't really care about. (You, a fan of trivia, probably want to know what that's about, though. Good news: today's "From the Archives" link explains it.) And second, the image makes a tongue-in-cheek joke about the fact that no one ever reads the fine print, stating "this is the fine print, why are you still reading this?" before suggesting the consumer go eat already.

It's true -- people almost never read the fine print. 

That is why a Georgia high school teacher named Donelan Andrews is $9,546 richer.

In 2019, Andrews was planning a trip to England with some friends but realized that there was a reasonably high chance that they'd have to cancel last minute. As the Washington Post reported, "each had someone in their lives who were elderly or sick," so Andrews decided to invest in some travel insurance. She did a bit of Googling and discovered a company called Squaremouth which had what she was looking for: a policy, called "Tin Leg," that would reimburse her if she did not take the trip. The policy cost her $454.

Like any other insurance company, though, Squaremouth won't take your money unless you agree to what often feels like an endless stream of terms and conditions that most lawyers probably can't understand. While Squaremouth wants you to be aware of what you're agreeing to, they also know that almost no one reads the fine print. And who can blame us? Per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the policy Andrews agreed to was more than 4,000 words long, or about eight times the length of the email you're now reading. But buried on page 7, per the AJC, was a magic paragraph, pasted below:

In an effort to highlight the importance of reviewing policy documents, we launched Pays to Read, a contest that rewards the individual who reads their policy information from start to finish. If you are reading this within the contest period ... and are the first to contact us, you may be awarded the Pays to Read contest Grand Prize of ten thousand dollars.