Receipts?!

Paper receipts are getting to be kind of ridiculous.

You see, I keep meticulous possession of all my receipts. They have a flow: through the wallet into the repurposed cereal box, which when full is taped shut and then piled atop my other receipt boxes to seldom be reviewed again. It's a good and worthwhile system. it means that I have a collection of evidence of my history. I can pop open a cereal box and search for the memory cues buried within. "Wow, we did buy a biodegradable cup of cherries at Granville Island in 2007! That was cool."

However, these receipts, when considered as given out to everyone as a record of every monetary transaction, indicate a MASSIVE CONSUMPTION OF PAPER THAT RARELY GET REVIEWED OR REUSED! I wonder how great the recycling rate is for them. Hmm hmm hmm. It clearly makes oodles more sense to receive electronic receipts, which can reveal your purchasing habits to even yourelf in ways only meticulous transcription and analysis would previously. It will also save oodles of paper.

I know banks already over you records of totals for each transaction, but they don't even offer that as an eternal history. I can only get my information back a few months, and then back a few more for a fee. It's outrageous. I worked for a company that also dealt with similar records that said "we don't want to become a data warehouse" to which I think: Yes, you do! Total and complete records are so very much more valuable than partial ones. I feel sorry for Google who must bend to privacy concerns and limit the peroid information is retained for. At least recency ends up being a bigger factor for them?

So yes, here's to digital receipts: their standardisation and omnipresence can not arrive soon enough.