Last week I wrote about the craziness of being given a paper receipt for a $3.03 scone. This clearly hit a nerve as we received more responses (by a factor of ten) than we’ve received on any other blog. It confirms what I feel.
And it goes way beyond the small purchases.
Get your clothes cleaned – get a receipt. Definitely need a record of that. Have you ever seen the amount of paper your local dry cleaner goes through?
Go food shopping – get a receipt. Yes, I know some people like to stand at checkout and go through their purchases item-by-item. But I would guess 98% of us do not. How about an option? Some of us don’t want to put three yards of paper in our wallets every week.
Go to a restaurant and pay with a credit or debit card – get three receipts. Three! One tells you what you owe, one allows you to tip and the other…does anybody have a clue why the other exists? Why can’t we just write our tips on the first receipt if we’re worried about keeping track? Or better yet, why can’t we join the rest of the modern world and do this digitally?
Go ship something from a post office and you’ll get a receipt three yards long. Don’t they know the Parks Department and Postal Service are on the same side and should be working together to save our trees?
Buy a house, sell a house, get a mortgage. Buy or lease a car. You’ll have enough paper to rival the Yellow Pages.
Why? The answer is simple. We allow it.
To quote Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore.”
These receipts are not only unnecessary and annoying but they may also be toxic, according to a CBS New report you can read by clicking here.
Forbes Magazine suggests 3.27 swimming pools can hold the entire global supply of gold. Can you imagine what it would take to hold all the stupid little pieces of paper being handed out by cashiers across the country? It wouldn’t be just three swimming pools. It’d be the Hudson River.
Starbucks has more than 23,000 locations across the globe. They are estimated to sell nearly 4 billion coffee-related products. Imagine the number of receipts, the amount of wasted paper, this ONE company generates! It is estimated that each year in the U.S. alone we waste 250 million gallons of oil, 1 billion gallons of water and destroy 10 million trees…for receipts. This also creates 1.5 billion pounds of waste.
So what do we do? Act!
Next time you buy something, tell the cashier you don’t want a receipt. If they say the machine prints out the receipt automatically, let the manager knows this is unacceptable. Make the case. If enough people say we’re “not gonna take it anymore” the companies will listen.
As individuals, we take a stand. As a collective, we make a difference.
Founder, Areena
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