Digital receipts

Why haven’t receipts gone digital yet? Why is paper still used for this?

I don’t know about you but when I receive a receipt at my local Co-Op or Tesco I simply put it into the bag and it gets thrown away along with the bag once my shopping is put away. And I can’t even begin to imagine how much paper and ink is wasted along with all this. Sure it’s recyclable, but who cares? Your still chopping down thousands (probably tens of thousands) of trees for all these wasted receipts.

My proposal - integrate it into bank cards. Let me click on a transaction in my online banking account and view the details for that purchase. How? Integrate it via the PIN input system, get a data standard for it all. In the end all the system would be doing is sending a few kilobytes instead of a few bytes through the fibre optic cable.

Better yet, localize the system - make it a gimmick with your store card. Let me view my Tesco receipts on my Tesco store card login online. Tesco already keep the data for market research purposes.. why not let me view it after purchasing at the store? Put in a simple ‘do you want receipts?’ option in my login so I can turn down receipts automatically upon the swiping of my club card. “Take your receipts with you!” - help me build an automatic shopping basket online of my regular goods. The possibilities of laziness are endless.

One step further - the mobile phone. Store it on my SIM card via some kind of infrared scanning. One for the future, but something to think about (especially with the emergence of payment with mobile phones in Japan, which hopefully is coming to the western world sooner rather than later).

"You will marvel at how easy it is to subscribe to my RSS feed."

Babylon A.D. Feels like they stopped half an hour away from a great movie. Did they run out of money? What a waste!