Anything with toxic thermal paper immediately goes to the trash if I can help it. Other than arguably being bad for the environment (so much paper wasted) they can also be harmful to you simply from touch. E.g. "A significant increase in urinary total BPA concentration was observed for cashiers handling daily thermal paper receipts. " [1][2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927604/

[2] https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/03/the-health-...

I've wondered for some time why card processors don't have an API to accept receipt data so that they could handle storing receipts along with the transactions. It would be a little less wasteful but also allow some of the newer banks to create some interesting products. Your bank or card issuer already knows which store you visited, when, and where. Knowing what products your purchased doesn't add too much more dimension of creepiness onto their pile of data.

Finally had to stop lurking here to share the good news... if you get the CVS app, buried within app settings is the option to go paperless. Once you do so, the registers won't even try to print a receipt which seems to confuse 10 out of 10 cashiers when they're about to ask if I want my receipt. Bonus points, receipts go directly to email.

Can also manage your prescriptions completely as well, a surprisingly easy user experience.

I wish we could just get rid of paper receipts by default. At the end of more or less every retail transaction, they kindly hand you a few inches (or feet) of trash, which is a waste.

Many places are kind enough to ask if you need the receipt, but it still prints out if you say no - the cashier just throws it directly away for you.

I get that some people need or want receipts for various reasons, but judging by the trash can outside many stores exits, many people don't want them. The world generates enough trash as is.

I can live with the long receipts. What I hate is the huge penalty for not having an affinity card. Safeway did that first, then Walgreens and CVS followed. Lucky doesn't do that, and I usually go there.

This has been bothering me for a long time, I learned from this article that you can disable receipt printing from the CVS app. Go into account settings and set email delivery to disable local print.

In Australia, most cashiers will ask you if you want the receipt when paying and you can decline so that they don't print it.

I usually decline and only ask for a receipt if the total is over $100.

I've only shopped there once, and I wonder if this is subconciously why.

(More likely something to do with revision control I suppose.)

I think if they just added coupons to your cvs card and emailed you a summary it would be a better customer experience

Well if they are so opposed to long receipts, why did they publish such a long article to begin with? /s

tl;dr coupons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWlNesxOGrU #ObligatoryHedberg

Loved the writing of this article!

Still a lot less paper than a kids school notebooks.

I believe that sometimes there are regulatory requirements to print receipts (as a transaction without a receipt is more likely to be cash-in-pocket tax avoidance).

My parents lived in Greece during the financial crisis, and at the time the tax agency would randomly audit people and require them to present 25% of their yearly income in the form of receipts. This was introduced as a way to get consumers to ask vendors for receipts (as a way to force them to input sales into their cash registers and book them as income)

For me, paper receipts are a quick and simple way to verify on-the-spot that the retailer hasn't screwed up the billing. If you're at the supermarket and everything is scanned by barcode, then everything's probably OK. If you're at a random mom-and-pop shop where product numbers and prices are entered into the POS by hand, well, cashiers are human beings, and we all make mistakes sometimes.

It would be nice if I could get an instant notification on my phone whenever my card is charged, itemizing the exact charges being added to my account, but today, that's a pipe-dream. Even then, paper receipts might be better because they keep that higher resolution of purchasing behavior private from my bank.

I'd agree that it would be a waste if I didn't get some kind of value from it. But I do. Whether society in aggregate gets enough of a benefit from it and whether more ecologically-friendly solutions are worth developing is a different question.

Walmart pay is great about this. All of my grocery receipts are easily accessible in the app, including a picture of the product in case the description isn't clear enough.

In the UK it's common for high street shops to ask to email receipts instead of printing. Unfortunately this means giving out personal data. For those using gmail google can track all your highstreet purchase history.