Were I do most of my grocery shopping they send me the receipts to my email. I guess you could make a third party service to better visualize them. Any suggestions for other improvements or companies that already has great receipts?
I know there are services that can connect to your bank and categorize your purchases but it would be great to have a finer granularity. Perhaps you could just forward all receipt emails.
As someone who worked as a supermarket cashier while in high school, having items come up on the receipt in the same order that you scanned them is incredibly necessary when sorting out customer issues.
Between that and changes in perception about spending, I'm certain that supermarkets would not want this. It's too pro-consumer for their bottom-line.
The article and photos show that relative prices are shown within categories. So it could be that your less expensive alcohol purchases seem insignificant, but each other category still visually demonstrates useful comparisons. (But that's an option; they might show the relative bar graph across categories, making it potentially less useful. Except for the original question... How did I spend $180? Oh! $100 wine bottle!)
ETA: OK you're right - in the example they show, the prices are relative across categories. Not sure if A/B testing could be done to figure out which way is better!
It seems that the wine(s) would be grouped together and the cheeses would be grouped together, possible with the veggies and possibly not. So the price disparity between a $100 bottle of wine and a $13 bottle of wine would be apparent, but it wouldn't affect the relative bars for the cheese or veggies.
I have wondered before why it is that you can't buy groceries with a 'compelling receipt' that shows you other database fields. Everything has calories/sugar/salt/fat etc. in a per 100g form (measurements are different in USA). So you could checkout some online shopping and see how many calories you are getting for your money.
If you wanted to improve your shopping you could see what was being wasted on 'empty calories' and remove it from the order. Just being to sort the checkout by 'most salt/100g' would be interesting to me and plenty of people who do diets.
However, this would not help most people to click the 'buy now' button.
So it is for this reason this receipt idea has to go. Receipts only really have to be read by people who do tax expense forms. Fancy receipts have been possible for years now - you could have a full colour receipt with pictures of everything, all fonts 'on brand', as fancy as it gets. But no retailer has decided to do this, there is something for the receipt we know being the throwaway thing it is.
I don't understand how a bubble chart based on percentage of the total from various departments fixes receipts? Knowing the percentage of my total that comes from a specific department isn't a problem I have, though maybe it is for others. I'd be more interested in being able to self categorize my purchases and breaking down the percentage that way.
Looks like a lot of ink wasted on a visualisation which is of limited benefit to the consumer, and likely to result in lost revenue for the retailer, as people become more aware of how much they are spending on particular product categories.
Actually, it would waste something: electricity. Thermal printers use power to heat the paper up, which makes it turn black. A receipt with more black printing on it takes more power to print.
Not all receipt printers are thermal, however: a lot are thermal-transfer, that uses heat to transfer ink from a film to the paper. That stuff looks much better, and lasts much longer than the crappy thermal-printed receipts.
Adding these black bars and bubble charts makes the receipt three times longer than it needs to be. Printing millions of these a year would be a huge waste for something that hardly anyone would look at.
The side-by-side picture in this article has the "new" receipt cropped off at the bottom, showing only half of the things that were purchased on the same amount of paper. Add all of the pricing information, addresses, etc. and that full receipt would be insanely long.
Receipt paper is already an environmental nightmare. Let's not add more of it.
- see items within categories from most expensive category to least, each category showing a percent of your total grocery bill
- see relative price within a category at a glance (even if you buy wine, that's within your alcohol category, so it won't mess up the relative pricing of your dairy or snacks)
What might not go so well
- the bubble chart is less universal and intuitive (and it's "quirky")
- does volume (of what's printed) matter for thermal printing costs?
- would waiting to print the receipt at the end cause a big slowdown vs printing as you ring items up? (I believe with most current systems, items can be added and removed, and they show up as 'add' and 'remove' line items, because it does print as you scan.)
Many people mentioned digital/CSV breakdowns. I know Home Depot quietly connected my credit card to my email address after asking me if I wanted a digital receipt, and I typed in an email. So this seems like a reasonable option, for anyone that grants permission. (Home Depot annoys me because I say "Yeah! E-mail me!" and then they hand me a receipt anyway. Ungh!)
More importantly, it doesn't solve the larger problem of "where did my money go?" since that usually is asked over a timeframe of more than one shopping trip. The question is usually "How did I spend $100 more this month on groceries than i budgeted?" and the only way to answer that is analyze all of the spend together
There are some good ideas here that would be nice in practice. I like the categories and the fact items within that category are organized by price.
However, IMHO, the bar chart and bubble charts are useless. These will only add to the cost, time, and confusion. Heck, most here don't even understand it.
Where is the cost per lb information (for the meat)? That's useful.
Do you have a source for that? It seems many thermal papers have BPA, but "highly toxic" seems like a bit of a stretch. If you have a study that shows adverse health effects in cashiers (or other populations) who handle these papers frequently, please share it.
I'm really no expert on the whole BPA thing, and I've read a lot of mixed research about it. I say "considered" toxic because of some of the research that has come out about it. I think ultimately we're not totally sure of the impact it has on health. There are quite a few studies done on this so far but none are particularly conclusive.
It seems the government of France is also taking a stance against the use of thermal paper in the EU. There have been some concerns about BPA levels in groundwater, too, but this would be from all sources of BPA that end up in landfills, not just thermal paper.
Calling it "highly" toxic might not be entirely accurate when compared to something like radium, but one of the issues with BPA is we're not entirely sure of the health impacts. As a hormone disruptor, it seems to manifest in undetectable ways (links to heart disease, infertility, etc.) so it may be hard to pin down the effects of exposure until enough historical data has been gathered.
According to Health Canada (my country) 92.7% of their sample population had BPA concentrations in blood, a number that actually increased in the 7 years after it was banned from consumer products. (https://globalnews.ca/news/3694669/bpa-blood-samples-common/)
I'm also not trying to call for an immediate ban on it or anything like that, but merely stating that creating more of it without solving this problem is probably not a great idea.
> If you, a non-loyal shopper, mosey into CVS and buy some Tylenol and a package of seasonal candy, you will get a receipt that is unspectacular (read: a normal length).
However, that's never been my experience. If I buy a pack of gum in a CVS, I'll get an insanely long (although not five-feet long) receipt for it even though I certainly am not a member of any CVS affinity program or anything.
I used to work for a large payment processing company that supplied POS systems to retailers, I was surprised to find that receipt length does matter a lot to some retailers.
The department that shipped till rolls liked long receipts, it made enough of a financial difference to them to matter.
The retailers hated long receipts, because obviously that meant they needed to buy more till rolls.
(It's worth remembering that the customers for most POS solutions are retailers, not the person who buys something in a shop)
> The retailers hated long receipts, because obviously that meant they needed to buy more till rolls.
Changing out the printer roll is very annoying as well, for a retailer's cashiers. It's slightly time consuming and it doesn't always go smoothly. It inevitably results in a customer having to wait longer, slowing the checkout process further. The less often that action is needed to be performed, the better.
That's the way older cash registers worked. It hasn't been commonplace for a couple decades for big retailers. POS terminals without screens need to let the cashier review mistakes so they can be corrected.
Receipt printers in the UK universally print at the end of the checkout process. They're very fast - it only takes a few seconds to print a receipt about a foot long. In addition, some supermarkets have a secondary printer which prints colour coupons at the same time at a similar speed. So, I don't think it would be a big slowdown.
> - would waiting to print the receipt at the end cause a big slowdown vs printing as you ring items up? (I believe with most current systems, items can be added and removed, and they show up as 'add' and 'remove' line items, because it does print as you scan.)
Most (all?) stores I go to print the receipt at the end of checkout, and it takes maybe 3 seconds at most, so I don't think that's an issue.
I would also be concerned that the longer receipt length means that people will be less likely to actually read it. (I know I personally tend to gloss over really long/verbose receipts, but I take the time to look at ones that are more densely packed. Maybe that's just me though.)
It takes 3 seconds to print because it doesn’t include any complex rendering (like a dynamic bubble chart) or need full state to determine how to print it. This design challenges a lot of assumptions that the current generation of receipt printers use.
That's the computer's problem, not the printer's. If rendering time really becomes an issue, it can start the rendering process while the humans are twiddling about with card reader terminals and making small talk.
The rendering itself isn't that large of a task and it'd all be done on the POS which has more than enough power to draw a couple circles. There's very little processing done on a thermal printer basically it's just decoding and drawing exactly what the source system tells it to. At most I'd expect it to add a second or two for the POS to do the calculations and send it to the printer.
> would waiting to print the receipt at the end cause a big slowdown vs printing as you ring items up? (I believe with most current systems, items can be added and removed, and they show up as 'add' and 'remove' line items, because it does print as you scan.)
print the bubble chart at the end of the receipt, job done
I said this on the other thread but I think the bubble chart should be moved to the back or below. The primary use of a receipt is auditing if they made a mistake and this design makes it harder to do so.
I feel a better solution would be a QR code at the bottom that combines each product's UPC and price with the name of the store, date, etc. From there it would be easy to feed that into an app. Whomever created the app could fund it by selling the consumer spending habit data. They could incentivise the app's use by providing analytics, directing consumers to cheaper alternatives and integrating coupons.
It'll have to be a link to a webpage/API. Thermal printers won't get you good enough resolution to put that much in a QR code for anything but a very small purchase with only a few items.
It's missing a qrcode with a date, uuid, total, tax and unguessable url to the items list and prices (or gzipped json of it) so that we can finally scan import receipts with software.
Qr codes should be mandatory on most paper docs IMO. Forms, invoices, contracts, etc.
Parent comment already covered that case. If the content is included in the code, it doesn't need to be stored anywhere.
Nobody said permanent, either. It'd be reasonable that the data expires after a certain amount of time. Preferable, even, for limiting exposure in the event of a breach.
Additionally, while I don't think this is the case for grocery stores, most stores do actually keep a record of every purchase made. The data and aggregated analytics on said data is huge, and it allows for things like faster returns and personalized coupons/recommendations.
3 bytes for prices up to 167772.16. If you frequently buy things more expensive than that, just have one of your servants transcribe the recipe to your favorite format.
1 byte for the number of items. If you buy more than 255 of one thing, we'll just add another line to the recipe.
That's 60 bits per line item. A QR code holds up to 23,648 bits. That makes up to 394 line items per QR code, without compression, which ought to be enough for anyone.
If you do buy more than that, the POS crashes^H prints another QR code.
>3 bytes for prices up to 167772.16. If you frequently buy things more expensive than that, just have one of your servants transcribe the recipe to your favorite format.
>1 byte for the number of items. If you buy more than 255 of one thing, we'll just add another line to the recipe.
You could split prices greater than 167772.16 into chunks, delimited by using zero for the number of items in the subseqent line items.
Receipt should be just data. Mixing analytics in it seems to be overkill. Making it easy to feed the data to a separate analytics app seems to be a better idea so that consumers can analyze their spending not only for that particular instance of purchase but also over a period of time.
Disagree, I look at my grocery shopping receipt every time to look where I spent more than expected and I love the look of this, would even pay a couple pennies extra to have it.
This might be a local thing, but in my experience shops work hard to obfuscate the receipts as much as possible. If they're competing on price, their tactic is usually to promote a few random products they have the best price on and then hope you'll pick their store to buy all your groceries. For that reason, they are absolutely against giving you raw data, because that would allow you to make a shopping list and find the store with the best total price.
I remember some people tried to do an app that would let you scan receipts and make comparisons, but they gave up. Even stores from the same huge chain would have different prices for the same item and a different name on the printed receipt as well. I don't want to get into conspiracy theory territory, but it looked very deliberate.
My thoughts exactly? Why would any store ever want this? It's completely against their interests. They want to sell high priced/high margin items. They don't want customers shamed into spending less on bakery and alcohol and other non-essentials.
Likewise customers might feel alienated seeing how much data they're giving to the store and feeling bad for spending 20 percent of their meat budget on a rib eye.
If you want to follow this closely your food buying habits, get an app. I think it'd be weird to have this receipt. I mean I'd have to shred the thing before I'd even be comfortable throwing it away!
This is great. We should use this.
Listing items in order of cost alone is a win. The bar plot is a nice touch. The category breakdown is also nice (minus he bubble plot).
I feel like this would help people budget and reduce waste.
Thermal printers are the ones where the text becomes invisible over time I believe.
They should be outlawed as a way of providing anything of record.
My credit union gives them as their way of giving you your statement.
Flux [0] in the UK are currently trying to irradiate the paper receipt. It's integrated with Monzo bank too. IIRC there's an API to do whatever you like with the data. I imagine Monzo will start doing cool data visitations to help your spending habits.
This is something that seems long overdue, so hopefully it takes off.
Interestingly, the domain is leading me to think on how we have reached a next phase in domain names, where you can not have $product.com anymore, but now need $verb$product.com. Of course what made this click for me is a domain I visit first whenever I (re)install a host: getflux.com
I would love to see this design adopted by major retailers. If that were to happen, could Ms. Lu receive any compensation for her contribution? I gather that the profit motive was far from her mind but this idea could still turn out to be a major contribution to commerce.
I may be wrong here, but my approach to this would be completely counter to the one taken. Instead of overhauling POS systems (which are painful/tedious to do), I would try to build an OCR app that reads the items and does all that viz in the app, saving some paper and ink in the process.
In addition to above constraint with POS systems, I don't have one stop shop for getting all items in one category (say groceries).
I would love to provide an email address and have the receipt sent to me in a machine readable format. It would allow me to automate tracking how much I spend on each item at the grocery store, for example.
And the thermal paper used will fade out after a while, which can be a problem when you need it for warranty purposes. I scan the important ones, but it would be easy to have it already in electronic form at the point of sale.
Paper, sure, but this is thermal paper, so no ink is used. You could arfue that the chemical coating on the paper is equivalent in resource cost to ink.
I wish we could skip that step altogether, and have that info gathered at the POS and sent to me by the method of my choice (could be through an email, etc) which I could parse myself.
Some retailers already give you the option to send an email receipt which I assume is tied to the card used.
Your solution may be the better product, but info on receipt has 100% user adoption compared to the extreme minority that will put in the extra work to download the app, scan the receipt, etc. Distribution is the big win here.
If you overhaul the system to provide those data via an API (instead of OCR-ing receipts or printing these relatively useless visualizations), then not only could DIY folks like the parent and myself do the analyses ourselves, but any number of personal finance tools could also support the system to make it easy for their customers to visualize their own data.
Same. Not everything fits into a single category. Is dried fruit "fruit" or "snacks"?
Also, I don't find the bubbles easy to scan or read.
If I was going to redesign the receipt, it would have everything I bought in descending order by price. The biggest pain point is how did my bill get so high? Your high value items will explain that much faster than these arbitrary categories.
[Item 1]: $56.78
[Item 2]: $28.48
[Item 3]: $10.65
Etc.
If that wasn't enough, then maybe a small table at the bottom of items in price categories:
Even without the categories ordering the items in descending value with the accompanying graphic representation make a huge difference in the ease of parsing where your money went. Those two changes alone would achieve much of her goal.
It's easy for techies to immediately jump to the "just use an app" solution, but the reality is that the vast majority of regular grocery store shoppers still use and rely on paper receipts, and that isn't going to change anytime soon. It's better to come up with an incremental solution that will be adopted by 70% of the population rather than a perfect one which will only reach 10%.
What's the incentive for a shop to provide this info? From their PoV they provide it in the itemizations. You can do with that what you will.
It's in the shop's interest to use an antipattern that obscures detail so you don't reflect on where your money is going, and possibly choose to spend less.
Value as judged by the customers, not rational actors. Useful as this is, drawing more focus to costs would drive customers to shop elsewhere. A version of this I could see shops actually implementing would be a graph of the "savings" per-item, a metric which is essentially meaningless but gives people savvy feelings.
I disagree. I would prefer to shop at a place that showed me this. It would increase my loyalty to that grocer. The downside to the grocer is that I might be less inclined to buy meat, but maybe that still works because I instead gravitate to expensive veg options and look at my percent spend and celebrate my good decision making.
The only way this would drive me to use a different grocery is if it did a price comparison vs other grocers and I discovered I was getting screwed...but even then, if it was marginal, I’m not sure I would change grocer.
Edit: currently, as a shopper, you are most likely to just look at the bottom line. I think you are right that grocer adoption would be complicated from a business decision perspective, but I think implementation of this would hit “brand names” more than anyone else. It’s in both the grocers and shoppers best interest.
I never said no one would like it, so your counterexample isn't a basis to disagree unless you think most people are as rational as you [think you are] in the checkout line (they aren't).
Besides, our own assessments of our preferences are notoriously inaccurate. It would be logical for you to like it, but I'll believe you actually do when you make choices reflecting the preference. Which you'll never have a chance to do unless some store's marketing department thinks this is a good idea.
You are right, I am disagreeing on the basis of speculation based on my own experiences and preferences. I assumed you were making an argument from the same place? That said, you are right, we will likely never have the opportunity to test this particular preference.
So, from the place of my personal experience: I am sucker like everyone else, and prefer stores that tell me a per-unit price that I can compare like-to-like brands, often to the point of irrationality. I will also grant that I could have a backlash on this if it makes the receipts unduly long, which is a reason for me to prefer RiteAid over CVS. Plenty of reasons not to like this. I just don't personally believe that drawing attention to price would be a reason for me to stop shopping at a place, although it would (hopefully) alter my buying habits within said store.
> You are right, I am disagreeing on the basis of speculation based on my own experiences and preferences. I assumed you were making an argument from the same place?
Actually, no. I too think I have logical preferences and would prefer the additional information--but I don't think typical shoppers would respond well to it, possibly including myself (because I don't know if I would act in accordance with my estimation of my hypothetical preferences). So I'm making my argument from psychological principles, and in particular by inferring what supermarkets know about the psychology of typical shoppers (because I'm not an expert, but I assume the people the big supermarkets consult to stay competitive are the best in the field).
> So, from the place of my personal experience: I am sucker like everyone else, and prefer stores that tell me a per-unit price that I can compare like-to-like brands, often to the point of irrationality.
If that's what people actually want, stores have no idea what they're doing. The supermarket where I usually shop uses different units for the "unit prices" of different brands, so if I want to compare unit prices I have to do the math myself. The information they highlight tends to be the "sales", which serve to: convey a feeling of beating the system (even when they're so common, taking the sale obviously just means not paying the sucker price); and constantly invalidate all previous price comparisons for commodities like coffee where in-depth price comparison would otherwise make sense.
> I just don't personally believe that drawing attention to price would be a reason for me to stop shopping at a place, although it would (hopefully) alter my buying habits within said store.
I wouldn't expect anyone would think they'd be unhappy to have the additional information, because people consistently assume their behavior is logical. Ha.
I don't know a lot about supermarket economics but I recall seeing articles about how supermarkets put impulse food right by the checkout. I just succumbed to that, and when I'm with my kids, I get chills when I see Paw Patrol or Frozen branded crap. That is intentional by the store and gives me zero value.
Also recently heard a story on NPR about the dynamics of shelf space. No one who needs to get that space other than a Canadian company would talk on record. And, if I heard correctly, not only do you pay for placement, but you can pay to position your competitors.
For these reasons, I really like that online shopping is becoming an option. But, I'm not sure Amazon will use any fewer dark patterns to fill their virtual shelf space.
> It's in the shop's interest to use an antipattern that obscures detail so you don't reflect on where your money is going, and possibly choose to spend less.
On the flip side, any grocery store that does this will automatically get my business, because I like this feature.
If you're worried about competition, this is a way to make customers happier without reducing your prices or primary costs -- just a software update on the register.
I think that is easy for much of the HN crowd to say -- where things like updates are a daily occurrence. But I think the world of POS systems is much slower, and requires a lot of testing and read tape to make even a simple change. I think the cost of updating some of these systems would be much more than one might think -- and many of them probably will require hardware changes.
The point I am trying to make is -- updating the format of the receipt across a fleet of POS systems is probably very expensive.
We have not even factored in the cost of what looks like extra ink, ware and tare adding graphics. It all adds up and is a big cost for something that 90+% of the time finds its self in the garbage.
Not US (so correct me if wrong), but the CVS receipt sees to be its own meme, making me doubt ink and paper are a significant factor. And no one is expecting them to change there usual roll-out process for such a change.
Other than changing a core system across hundreds of stores, being held up by scotch tape, prayers and manual processes? Some ungodly mix of obsolete tech like Oracle DB, unsupported Microsoft fad from decades ago, crap hardware? Gargantuan codebases without version control?
This is all real-world examples I have personally witnessed in the field, I'm not a greying veteran.
I saw a country-wide costumer-facing e-commerce site displaying the wrong prices for days because the ElasticSearch cache was being manually updated daily by someone who was on her probation period, not even a proper employee yet. She ran that job manually daily for months, including weekends, holidays, etc, until her father died and the production site was in stasis for that time. I'm pretty sure this was never ackknowledged oficially and she is still there earning about 1000€ per month.
My local doesn't even print accurate unit prices due to shrinkflation and incorrect information from distributers. And it's a national chain.
This feature also ties up customer service time on categorisation corrections (some accurate, some not) and reduces your ability to accept changes to the POS developed by its supplier.
> What's the incentive for a shop to provide this info?
Doing something nice for other humans.
Oh wait a minute, I guess you thought we all exist only to make boatloads of money. Yeah, let's stick with mediocre things then! That'll really make 'em pay.
It might be taken up as a feature for POS companies as a competitive advantage. I can hear it now... "The point of sale is your last chance to leave a positive impression with your customers. This feature will keep your store in their minds as they consider their shopping habits back at home. Buy the Acme integrated POS system and make your management, staff, AND customers happy".
Some stores in my neck of the woods did this a couple of decades back. I think everyone stopped because it's pointless. It adds expense for the stores, and it looks like marketing, so few people actually trust the amounts.
When i find a receipt the first thing I often wish to know is when it is dated, so if it's old I can just dump it. It can be really frustrating as it can be anywhere on tiny piece of paper.
There should be a receipts standard that all should have to comply with so everything is always in same place.
190 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadI know there are services that can connect to your bank and categorize your purchases but it would be great to have a finer granularity. Perhaps you could just forward all receipt emails.
Are you suggesting an app that is connected to register that shows the scanning activity live, and somehow retaining that entirely in digital copy??
And it doesn't mean you wouldn't be able to get a paper copy in addition if you want.
That's far from the most insurmountable problem of digital receipts.
Agree. It's a writing anti-pattern with clickbait origins.
Ideas, feedback and criticism is always appreciated!
What happens if I buy a $100 bottle of wine and the rest is small priced cheeses and vegetables for a party? It becomes useless.
Between that and changes in perception about spending, I'm certain that supermarkets would not want this. It's too pro-consumer for their bottom-line.
Do you find this an everyday event?
It seems so.
> What happens if I buy a $100 bottle of wine and the rest is small priced cheeses and vegetables for a party? It becomes useless.
Sounds like an atypical every-day purchase for most people, and not what this is optimized for.
ETA: OK you're right - in the example they show, the prices are relative across categories. Not sure if A/B testing could be done to figure out which way is better!
If you wanted to improve your shopping you could see what was being wasted on 'empty calories' and remove it from the order. Just being to sort the checkout by 'most salt/100g' would be interesting to me and plenty of people who do diets.
However, this would not help most people to click the 'buy now' button.
So it is for this reason this receipt idea has to go. Receipts only really have to be read by people who do tax expense forms. Fancy receipts have been possible for years now - you could have a full colour receipt with pictures of everything, all fonts 'on brand', as fancy as it gets. But no retailer has decided to do this, there is something for the receipt we know being the throwaway thing it is.
Not all receipt printers are thermal, however: a lot are thermal-transfer, that uses heat to transfer ink from a film to the paper. That stuff looks much better, and lasts much longer than the crappy thermal-printed receipts.
Receipt paper is already an environmental nightmare. Let's not add more of it.
Just a QR code that translates to a csv of items and their costs.
What she got right
- see items within categories from most expensive category to least, each category showing a percent of your total grocery bill
- see relative price within a category at a glance (even if you buy wine, that's within your alcohol category, so it won't mess up the relative pricing of your dairy or snacks)
What might not go so well
- the bubble chart is less universal and intuitive (and it's "quirky")
- does volume (of what's printed) matter for thermal printing costs?
- would waiting to print the receipt at the end cause a big slowdown vs printing as you ring items up? (I believe with most current systems, items can be added and removed, and they show up as 'add' and 'remove' line items, because it does print as you scan.)
Many people mentioned digital/CSV breakdowns. I know Home Depot quietly connected my credit card to my email address after asking me if I wanted a digital receipt, and I typed in an email. So this seems like a reasonable option, for anyone that grants permission. (Home Depot annoys me because I say "Yeah! E-mail me!" and then they hand me a receipt anyway. Ungh!)
a) costs money
b) is considered to be highly toxic
c) often isn't accepted by local recycling programs (but people still throw receipts in anyway)
d) ultimately end up in the garbage, or even just littering street corners.
Yes.
There are some good ideas here that would be nice in practice. I like the categories and the fact items within that category are organized by price.
However, IMHO, the bar chart and bubble charts are useless. These will only add to the cost, time, and confusion. Heck, most here don't even understand it.
Where is the cost per lb information (for the meat)? That's useful.
Do you have a source for that? It seems many thermal papers have BPA, but "highly toxic" seems like a bit of a stretch. If you have a study that shows adverse health effects in cashiers (or other populations) who handle these papers frequently, please share it.
edit: Just to clarify, when I think highly toxic, I think of things like Radium Jaw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_jaw
Here's one relating to cashiers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4824622/
And a more generalized one relating to factory workers who produce products containing BPA (like thermal paper): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5634705/
It seems the government of France is also taking a stance against the use of thermal paper in the EU. There have been some concerns about BPA levels in groundwater, too, but this would be from all sources of BPA that end up in landfills, not just thermal paper.
Calling it "highly" toxic might not be entirely accurate when compared to something like radium, but one of the issues with BPA is we're not entirely sure of the health impacts. As a hormone disruptor, it seems to manifest in undetectable ways (links to heart disease, infertility, etc.) so it may be hard to pin down the effects of exposure until enough historical data has been gathered.
According to Health Canada (my country) 92.7% of their sample population had BPA concentrations in blood, a number that actually increased in the 7 years after it was banned from consumer products. (https://globalnews.ca/news/3694669/bpa-blood-samples-common/)
I'm also not trying to call for an immediate ban on it or anything like that, but merely stating that creating more of it without solving this problem is probably not a great idea.
Someone tell CVS. I don't think I've gotten a receipt from them shorter than a foot in length.
> If you, a non-loyal shopper, mosey into CVS and buy some Tylenol and a package of seasonal candy, you will get a receipt that is unspectacular (read: a normal length).
However, that's never been my experience. If I buy a pack of gum in a CVS, I'll get an insanely long (although not five-feet long) receipt for it even though I certainly am not a member of any CVS affinity program or anything.
I used to work for a large payment processing company that supplied POS systems to retailers, I was surprised to find that receipt length does matter a lot to some retailers.
The department that shipped till rolls liked long receipts, it made enough of a financial difference to them to matter.
The retailers hated long receipts, because obviously that meant they needed to buy more till rolls.
(It's worth remembering that the customers for most POS solutions are retailers, not the person who buys something in a shop)
Why did this surprise you? It's what I would have expected.
I also expect that customers like overly long receipts just about as little as retailers.
Changing out the printer roll is very annoying as well, for a retailer's cashiers. It's slightly time consuming and it doesn't always go smoothly. It inevitably results in a customer having to wait longer, slowing the checkout process further. The less often that action is needed to be performed, the better.
I'm in the midwest and I've never seen this anywhere
Most (all?) stores I go to print the receipt at the end of checkout, and it takes maybe 3 seconds at most, so I don't think that's an issue.
I would also be concerned that the longer receipt length means that people will be less likely to actually read it. (I know I personally tend to gloss over really long/verbose receipts, but I take the time to look at ones that are more densely packed. Maybe that's just me though.)
print the bubble chart at the end of the receipt, job done
It's missing a qrcode with a date, uuid, total, tax and unguessable url to the items list and prices (or gzipped json of it) so that we can finally scan import receipts with software.
Qr codes should be mandatory on most paper docs IMO. Forms, invoices, contracts, etc.
Parent comment already covered that case. If the content is included in the code, it doesn't need to be stored anywhere.
Nobody said permanent, either. It'd be reasonable that the data expires after a certain amount of time. Preferable, even, for limiting exposure in the event of a breach.
Additionally, while I don't think this is the case for grocery stores, most stores do actually keep a record of every purchase made. The data and aggregated analytics on said data is huge, and it allows for things like faster returns and personalized coupons/recommendations.
30 bits to represent the 13 digit IAN.
3 bytes for prices up to 167772.16. If you frequently buy things more expensive than that, just have one of your servants transcribe the recipe to your favorite format.
1 byte for the number of items. If you buy more than 255 of one thing, we'll just add another line to the recipe.
That's 60 bits per line item. A QR code holds up to 23,648 bits. That makes up to 394 line items per QR code, without compression, which ought to be enough for anyone.
If you do buy more than that, the POS crashes^H prints another QR code.
>1 byte for the number of items. If you buy more than 255 of one thing, we'll just add another line to the recipe.
You could split prices greater than 167772.16 into chunks, delimited by using zero for the number of items in the subseqent line items.
https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/pft/2016/12/23/is-...
I remember some people tried to do an app that would let you scan receipts and make comparisons, but they gave up. Even stores from the same huge chain would have different prices for the same item and a different name on the printed receipt as well. I don't want to get into conspiracy theory territory, but it looked very deliberate.
Eastern Europe here BTW.
Likewise customers might feel alienated seeing how much data they're giving to the store and feeling bad for spending 20 percent of their meat budget on a rib eye.
If you want to follow this closely your food buying habits, get an app. I think it'd be weird to have this receipt. I mean I'd have to shred the thing before I'd even be comfortable throwing it away!
[0] https://www.tryflux.com/
Interestingly, the domain is leading me to think on how we have reached a next phase in domain names, where you can not have $product.com anymore, but now need $verb$product.com. Of course what made this click for me is a domain I visit first whenever I (re)install a host: getflux.com
I may be wrong here, but my approach to this would be completely counter to the one taken. Instead of overhauling POS systems (which are painful/tedious to do), I would try to build an OCR app that reads the items and does all that viz in the app, saving some paper and ink in the process.
In addition to above constraint with POS systems, I don't have one stop shop for getting all items in one category (say groceries).
I don’t care about a printed receipt. Find a way for me to have proof of purchase without.
https://github.com/dtbrad/grocer
You can get them to email receipts.
Some retailers already give you the option to send an email receipt which I assume is tied to the card used.
How do you define "user adoption"? If a customer never looks at the receipt, then has the customer adopted the practice in any meaningful sense?
Also, I don't find the bubbles easy to scan or read.
If I was going to redesign the receipt, it would have everything I bought in descending order by price. The biggest pain point is how did my bill get so high? Your high value items will explain that much faster than these arbitrary categories.
[Item 1]: $56.78
[Item 2]: $28.48
[Item 3]: $10.65
Etc.
If that wasn't enough, then maybe a small table at the bottom of items in price categories:
$0-$5: 15 items, $38.94
$5-$10: 1 item, $7.52
Etc.
It's in the shop's interest to use an antipattern that obscures detail so you don't reflect on where your money is going, and possibly choose to spend less.
The only way this would drive me to use a different grocery is if it did a price comparison vs other grocers and I discovered I was getting screwed...but even then, if it was marginal, I’m not sure I would change grocer.
Edit: currently, as a shopper, you are most likely to just look at the bottom line. I think you are right that grocer adoption would be complicated from a business decision perspective, but I think implementation of this would hit “brand names” more than anyone else. It’s in both the grocers and shoppers best interest.
Besides, our own assessments of our preferences are notoriously inaccurate. It would be logical for you to like it, but I'll believe you actually do when you make choices reflecting the preference. Which you'll never have a chance to do unless some store's marketing department thinks this is a good idea.
So, from the place of my personal experience: I am sucker like everyone else, and prefer stores that tell me a per-unit price that I can compare like-to-like brands, often to the point of irrationality. I will also grant that I could have a backlash on this if it makes the receipts unduly long, which is a reason for me to prefer RiteAid over CVS. Plenty of reasons not to like this. I just don't personally believe that drawing attention to price would be a reason for me to stop shopping at a place, although it would (hopefully) alter my buying habits within said store.
Actually, no. I too think I have logical preferences and would prefer the additional information--but I don't think typical shoppers would respond well to it, possibly including myself (because I don't know if I would act in accordance with my estimation of my hypothetical preferences). So I'm making my argument from psychological principles, and in particular by inferring what supermarkets know about the psychology of typical shoppers (because I'm not an expert, but I assume the people the big supermarkets consult to stay competitive are the best in the field).
> So, from the place of my personal experience: I am sucker like everyone else, and prefer stores that tell me a per-unit price that I can compare like-to-like brands, often to the point of irrationality.
If that's what people actually want, stores have no idea what they're doing. The supermarket where I usually shop uses different units for the "unit prices" of different brands, so if I want to compare unit prices I have to do the math myself. The information they highlight tends to be the "sales", which serve to: convey a feeling of beating the system (even when they're so common, taking the sale obviously just means not paying the sucker price); and constantly invalidate all previous price comparisons for commodities like coffee where in-depth price comparison would otherwise make sense.
> I just don't personally believe that drawing attention to price would be a reason for me to stop shopping at a place, although it would (hopefully) alter my buying habits within said store.
I wouldn't expect anyone would think they'd be unhappy to have the additional information, because people consistently assume their behavior is logical. Ha.
Also recently heard a story on NPR about the dynamics of shelf space. No one who needs to get that space other than a Canadian company would talk on record. And, if I heard correctly, not only do you pay for placement, but you can pay to position your competitors.
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/30/718711109/how-grocery-shelves...
For these reasons, I really like that online shopping is becoming an option. But, I'm not sure Amazon will use any fewer dark patterns to fill their virtual shelf space.
On the flip side, any grocery store that does this will automatically get my business, because I like this feature.
I see your point, but I don't think the average user will care about this, and it would be a huge cost to get a handful of like minded people.
The cost will be huge because nothing like this would ever be free/cheap.
The point I am trying to make is -- updating the format of the receipt across a fleet of POS systems is probably very expensive.
We have not even factored in the cost of what looks like extra ink, ware and tare adding graphics. It all adds up and is a big cost for something that 90+% of the time finds its self in the garbage.
This is all real-world examples I have personally witnessed in the field, I'm not a greying veteran.
I saw a country-wide costumer-facing e-commerce site displaying the wrong prices for days because the ElasticSearch cache was being manually updated daily by someone who was on her probation period, not even a proper employee yet. She ran that job manually daily for months, including weekends, holidays, etc, until her father died and the production site was in stasis for that time. I'm pretty sure this was never ackknowledged oficially and she is still there earning about 1000€ per month.
This feature also ties up customer service time on categorisation corrections (some accurate, some not) and reduces your ability to accept changes to the POS developed by its supplier.
Doing something nice for other humans.
Oh wait a minute, I guess you thought we all exist only to make boatloads of money. Yeah, let's stick with mediocre things then! That'll really make 'em pay.
We live in a capitalist system after all
It's one reason I do as much as I can to buy from owner-operated small businesses.
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-brand-match-receipts-from-...