Keeping Receipts

Online shopping is convenient and even the norm for many items. Going to the store sounds like a time-consuming labor or an exceptional outing. My family, for example, lives in a suburban location that doesn’t have well-priced grocery home delivery. Shipping only works for some non-perishables. So, for many items we order online and do ‘drive-up pick-up’. We don’t even need to go into the store for many items. And reordering the same items repeatedly is a breeze.

We are also accustomed to the ability to return things. If your blender breaks on your first smoothie, then no worries – you can return it. If the chocolate cookies don’t taste like chocolate? Return it – satisfaction guaranteed. You can buy three pairs of shoes in different sizes and then keep the ones you want at the original sale price. Return the others.

For me, besides the time saved and convenience, a major factor in my decision to make purchases online is the documentation. I don’t need to save the receipt in a shoe box, Ziploc, or file drawer – the online retailer keeps an archive of all my purchases. Often this includes the date, amount, and shipping details including delivery date. There’s a super convenient digital paper trail.

If I need to contact a seller in order to exercise a warranty, then I have their contact information. I don’t need to retain the product packaging or investigate the brand at a future inopportune time. For example, I recently bought a Little Tykes water table for my kids. As I was assembling it on Christmas Eve I realized that I was missing a small part. I was able to work around it. But I was also able to immediately contact the manufacturer with a copy of my invoice. I emailed the date of purchase, the product model number, and the instruction manual had conveniently included part numbers. They were able to ship me the parts after a single email. Online shopping, and the resulting trail of evidence, makes the process much more practical than keeping paper records in a likely unorganized fashion.

There are other benefits to the paper trail. Back before widespread online shopping, retailers would often offer rebates as a sales strategy. In the year 2004, I bought a computer hard drive for $120 before a $40 mail-in rebate. The retailer (or manufacturer, I can’t remember) was hoping that people saw the post-rebate price and then failed to redeem it. And that often happened. You needed to fill out a rebate form on an index card, cut the UPC bar code of the product packaging, and then mail them with your receipt to the company rebate department in a stamped envelope. If you dragged your feet, then you’d probably lose an important piece of the crucial combination and lose out on your $40 rebate. If the items were lost in the mail, then you were shucks-out-of-luck. Now, rebates have gone the way of the dodo since receipts are automatically retained and retrievable.

For most of the 20^th century, we were given a receipt and we hoped for the best. Mitch Hedberg has a famous routine about keeping the receipt from purchasing a donut because he *might* need to prove his purchase. The receipt was his documentation which could be filed away for later.

But there was a time when the receipt was the innovation. Once upon a time prior to the 20^th century, you’d pay for an item, and then depart without the involvement of ink and paper. Besides the conveniences of documentation above, the purchaser didn’t have a record of the amount paid, the itemized prices, or the amount of change if applicable. Calculating the total sum was done with a separate device or by hand. Returns were a matter of knowing the salesman and maintaining reputations.

The original cash registers were a technology for announcing and documenting sales as a means of deterring employee theft. They were a technology of management, specialization, and scale. It was a big deal when the National Cash Register company introduced in 1919 a cash register which had the standard bells and whistles. It would document the item prices, sum them, and print it all on a receipt for the buyer and the seller. There were no math mistakes and the sales of the day could be compared against the balance of cash in the drawer.

We tend to see the receipt as a consumer convenience, if we think about it at all. In a digital world, receipts are nearly costless to create and include an arbitrary amount of information. They enable easier warranties, registrations, returns, repeat purchases, and robust record keeping. But receipts were originally used to aid the seller and not the buyer. Except for the adding and memory, most of what receipts do is to help facilitate commercial relationships. Initially between the manager and the cashier, then between the retailer and the consumer. Receipts are a tool that help us act like we are more trusting and trustworthy than we would if we were left to our own devices. Thanks to receipts, we can keep less in our head, enjoy a greater variety of product services, and enjoy more gains from trade.

There’s more to the story that involves sales taxes. But that’s for another time.