The humble receipt gets a redesign | Hacker News Reader

The humble receipt gets a redesign

fastcompany.com

207 pointscolinprince184 comments

Struggling to understand the use case for this. I stare at my grocery receipts like everyone else, but it's to verify the prices I bought them at; sometimes I pick up an item that I think is marked on sale, when it's actually the adjacent item that's been discounted. As a whole, the bubble chart doesn't tell me anything. Meat costs more than an equivalent amount of fruit. Unless you're looking to go vegetarian for financial reasons, you're not going to learn much from that chart.

Splitting up items into a taxonomy is somewhat useful, but not when it only exists on a printed receipt that will go into the trash. It's also not that useful if you make multiple trips a week, as single people often do.

Finally, it's not useful at all if the categories are based on the company's SKU/ERP nomenclature, as opposed to a human-centric approach. If one brand of Ice Cream appears under "Eggs & Dairy" but another under "Confectionery/Bakery" what value do you get by having that itemized on a receipt?

I like it more than the old fashioned receipt it seeks to replace. I would look at it and it would bring me a small, fleeting bit of joy.

I prefer no receipts at all, but that doesn't seem to be a universal option. So if I'm going to get the paper receipt anyway, may as well have some pleasing design applied to it, and a thought-provoking categorization for me to reflect upon before I crumple and toss the thing. Beats the pants off of the old version.

If I was reading a business plan and being asked to invest, yeah, I'd respond to it your way too. As a "thing that could exist", though, I appreciate it.

I just don't think groceries are the right market for this. For "joy", the differentiator has to be in-person customer service, because grocery margins are razor-thin, and the last thing any exec wants to propose is to modify the ERP (there be dragons) so it generates the clean data that's required for visualizations.

At my store, they are pushing to reduce checkout staff by "encouraging" customers to use self-checkout. It hasn't been going well, but this is a retail-wide trend, and cost-cutting pressures are immense.

Again, because this is so data-centric, the visualizations will generate errors and miscategorizations that will confuse customers more than if they had ye olde dot matrix printed receipt.

> At my store, they are pushing to reduce checkout staff by "encouraging" customers to use self-checkout. It hasn't been going well, but this is a retail-wide trend, and cost-cutting pressures are immense.

This infuriates me so much, I started to see if I could game the system. Fruit is the easy part, you fill your bag with the expensive fruit, and select apples or something cheap on the checkout scale. Works better on larger stores, the minimum wage person overseeing 6 self-checkout machines can't watch everything, maybe half the people need help, or the scale borks for some reason.

My local supermarket replaced pre-packaged bread bags, weighted by the employees with a complete alacarte system which is complete shitshow. You pick the bread on one place, do your entire shopping and then have to remember what kind of SKU have you chosen. It's a complete waste of time for everyone, and I'm pretty sure the surrounding traditional bakeries won here, the bread selection has lowered substantially on the supermarket.

So you're "infuriated" that retail stores have to cut staff in order to survive, yet in the next breath you boast about how simple it is to steal from the store? I see you also didn't forget to belittle the hapless "minimum wage person" who you're purporting to care about.

> yet in the next breath you boast about how simple it is to steal from the store?

> I see you also didn't forget to belittle the hapless "minimum wage person" who you're purporting to care about.

That's my point. The employees are valuable, even in a pure profit-driven analysis.

> retail stores have to cut staff in order to survive

This is completely false, "surviving" is not the word to describe retailers.

We track our spending based on budget categories. Grocery stores are the toughest, as items bought there might fall into the category of "food" or "personal care" or "household items" or "pets" or other categories.

Most receipts are easy - the name of the store is all we need to know what category that spending falls into. Grocery receipts we generally have to look at items and divide.

This sort of information would make that a whole lot easier.

What if we were able to have our receipts sent and associated with our credit card transactions auto magically. Then we could openly export and perform our own analysis using that information.

At some point grocery chains may include that feature on their apps, which for the most part mostly focus on displaying coupons. The app would include the breakdowns and amounts spent, I can see that helping with customer loyalty.

> Struggling to understand the use case for this.

The article lays out the use case for this near the beginning. Having the information laid out on the receipt like this provides at a quick glance the relative cost of the items you purchased.

I tried to address this in my comment. The "at a glance" info works in a ideal environment where all items are accurately and uniformly classified across the database, which is far from a given. Those databases are meant to serve the goals of supply chain and finance people, and they won't agree to a change in their product coding processes so that customer receipts can now generate a bubble chart.

But what's the use case for having that overview on the receipt? What would you do with it?

I, too, don't really understand the purpose. It wouldn't bother me if those circles were there, but I don't know what good it would do me.

Most receipts are easy - the name of the store is all we need to know what category that spending falls into. Grocery receipts we generally have to look at items and divide.

This sort of information would make that a whole lot easier.

I'm not wondering about the usefulness of categorization (so long as the categories are standardized). I'm wondering about the usefulness of those circles.

How is it useful to know what percentage of spending went in each category in a single grocery trip? You can't combine that data with the same data from other grocery trips, and the only way I can think that knowing what percentage of spending went into what category is if it's done broadly, such as for all shopping in a given week or month.

What's bad: The bubble chart. Even if you thought a report by category was useful, comparing areas is really hard on the brain; it should have been a table or bar chart.

What's meh: The bars for price. Maybe they help; maybe they make my already-to-long receipt every longer.

What's great: Sort by category then by price descending. Helps for both finding items on a long receipt, and also getting a quick glance at the most important (read: expensive) ones. It's a simple improvement that only sacrifices the historic streaming print of a receipt. I'll accept if I have to look in to a couple places before I find it. I did just visit the grocery store after all.

> Sort by category then by price descending.

Yes, that is genuinely useful. The percentages could even be in the category headers, for those who want that sort of breakdown.

Struggling to understand the use case for this

It could be grouped slightly differently to organise items into food groups: imagine doing a weekly shop, then finding out that most of your shop is carbs and sugar. This may not be news to you, but if you're trying to eat a more balanced diet then it could help.

https://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Goodfood/Documents/The-Eatwell-G...

Even then, wouldn't the weighting of the items be based on cost, and not nutritional value per serving? 1L tub of ice cream is usually cheaper than a 1lb steak. And even then, you likely aren't consuming the two items at the same rate. So on trip #2, you might buy another steak, but you won't be buying another tub of ice cream.

Here's my opinion:

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!)

The print volume matters. These new receipts would be at least 3x longer than they need to be, and thermal paper:

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.

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

>The print volume matters.

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.

I'm a person who understands things best visually. For me the bubble chart was pointless but the bar chart is very useful.

> b) is considered to be highly toxic

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

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.

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.

> The print volume matters.

Someone tell CVS. I don't think I've gotten a receipt from them shorter than a foot in length.

I was going to make the same comment about CVS

That's one of the reasons why I tend to avoid CVS.

For non-Americans, this is not an exaggeration... https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/10/17956950/why-are-cv...

That article is interesting. It says:

> 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.

> 3x longer

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)

I don't think retail customers prefer longer receipts, either.

> I was surprised to find that receipt length does matter a lot to some retailers.

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.

> 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.

> because it does print as you scan

I'm in the midwest and I've never seen this anywhere

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.

The print time is proportional to the number of lines with pixels

Watching the fast thermal printers in stores it's fluid enough it might just be directly related to length.

> 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 haven't come across a register that did print as you scan in like a decade now, even in the smallest of stores.

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.

The company interest is also to give customers value

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.

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.

I like to think so but it rarely feels that way.

> 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.

Seems like a lot of effort to get one umvi to shop at their store. They will likely have to push this out across an entire chain.

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.

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.

What exactly do you think would be costly and huge about this?

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.

> Oh wait a minute, I guess you thought we all exist only to make boatloads of money.

We live in a capitalist system after all

Living in a capitalist economy and existing for capitalism are distinct things, but I understand why people would miss that.

That seems to be the recipe of most retail businesses, especially grocery stores: treat the customer as a cow to be milked

It's one reason I do as much as I can to buy from owner-operated small businesses.

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".

What about a receipt that shows you how much you would have spent had you shopped at a competitor?

Some British supermarkets do (or did?) that. Sainsbury's give a voucher for the difference, if it was more expensive than equivalent shops.

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-brand-match-receipts-from-...

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.

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.

Eastern Europe here BTW.

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!

For what it is worth, Føtex, one of the largest supermarket chains in Denmark prints the receipt with the items ordered in categories.

I'm surprised by the reception this is getting.

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.

Apple do this and I’ve shopped at some other places that also do it.

I don’t care about a printed receipt. Find a way for me to have proof of purchase without.

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.

This guy made it for New Seasons, a local high end supermarket.

https://github.com/dtbrad/grocer

You can get them to email receipts.

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.

> info on receipt has 100% user adoption

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?

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:

$0-$5: 15 items, $38.94

$5-$10: 1 item, $7.52

Etc.

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%.

I was hoping was this about removing the toxic chemicals from thermal printer paper used for receipts. I refuse to touch that stuff and I warn cashiers that they should wash their hands often.

So you're that person. I love it. keep it up.

FWIW it's already been banned in Connecticut.

I was hoping it some means of stopping issuing paper at all

TIL: https://www.pca.state.mn.us/green-chemistry/bpa-thermal-pape...

I so agree about the topic. And while I do touch the receipts, though less and less the more I think about it, I am spending more time telling people they shouldn't touch it AND that it can't be recycled. The latter is always a big surprise. (Thanks to a witness at a public hearing on DC's Department of Energy and the Environment for raising this; it's the only thing I remember from the hearing!)

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.

I rather have them digitally. Also, can we leave it with the "just did x" titles.

"A foo just bar" appears to be a fully acceptable title template. And sticking "now" in the previous sentence would make acceptable title too!

how do you contest wrong quantity scanned, while in person? Less effective to seek reimbursement to do so after leaving the shop.

Are you suggesting an app that is connected to register that shows the scanning activity live, and somehow retaining that entirely in digital copy??

If you pay by card it could just be handled by Visa for instance. That would be neat.

And it doesn't mean you wouldn't be able to get a paper copy in addition if you want.

You open up your email/website/app/whathaveyou and check there?

That's far from the most insurmountable problem of digital receipts.

> can we leave it with the "just did x" titles

Agree. It's a writing anti-pattern with clickbait origins.

Myself and a group of friends have been working on a email receipt parsing framework: https://github.com/openreceipt/source

Ideas, feedback and criticism is always appreciated!

I usually like fresh takes on traditional, utilitarian design. But this has left me cold. For two main reasons:

1. This is trying to fix a problem which doesn't exist for 99% of people. A family struggling to figure out the math of feeding their kids with ~$0 will not recognise "mindful" shopping.

2. There are much better problems to solve in retail. Store design is confrontational and manipulative. Fix that first. Then fix packaging and presentation so that we all understand a bit more about what we're buying and how we can cook stuff. Then create meal deals which match ingredients, rather than pre-packs.

But I think the main reason this idea felt like the lowest of low-hanging fruit, is this: I'm severely sight impaired, and, on ocassion, I still get shouted at by staff when I can't negotiate an automated checkout easily, or I don't understand a chocolate-pimping deal they are pushing at checkout. Customer service is focused on "service", not "customers". Fix that first, then create pretty reciept graphs.

Love it.

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.

You'd like to mandate that all stores keep a permanent record of every purchase ever made?

> (or gzipped json of it)

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.

No need for that.

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.

That sounds solid, thanks for the detailed breakdown.

>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.

I think it's simpler to make the field variable length. The same is necessary for the count field, buying >= 256 grams of something is common.

I was thinking same & commented.

Instead, what if receipts just include a QR code to a web page giving all kinds of details? customer could save or integrate with their personal financial management service.

I really like this idea, a small QR code would save a lot of paper, _and_ avoid the requirement that I give the store my email address for an electronic receipt.

My thoughts exactly, this approach helps with the issue of anonymous purchases (i.e. retailers linking payments with email addresses[0]) although presumably retailers will try and make up for it by shoving analytics on the receipt display page, though that can also be disabled with an adblocker.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/shortcuts/2016/oct/16/sho...

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.

Good on Susie! There's something really cool and fun about integrating data visualisation into an old school receipt.

My question is, what prevents itemisation in bank statements directly?

I have always wanted for my itemised purchases to show up directly in my bank account (instead of just the total). From there, I could see how much I am spending by either automatically generated or manually defined categories. One step further would allow me to budget my money not into separate accounts but by category (think sub-folders within your accounts). You can define the limits of a category and transactions are declined when you've hit your budget and attempt a purchase of that category / product type.

Is there any argument to be made for the bank not having access to the individual purchases (e.g. privacy concerns, too much data)?

Are account holders with a grasp and control of their money and spending not more beneficial to a bank / businesses (not an expert, so forgive me if this is a bit naive)?

I think some third party apps attempt to solve this, but as far as I'm aware they are more of a view of your accounts and not able to control transactions / spending limits. Personally I'd also rather not give my buying information to another entity.

> Is there any argument to be made for the bank not having access to the individual purchases (e.g. privacy concerns, too much data)?

I can't get my head around the fact that you are actually suggesting this. Do you want your bank to know that you buy 30-40 bottles of beer each week? Do you want them to know that you buy medicine for a terminal disease during your visit to discuss a family home loan?

> I have always wanted for my itemised purchases to show up directly in my bank account (instead of just the total).

I 100% do not want this, ever, period.

Why not?

See the sibling comment in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19903991

> I can't get my head around the fact that you are actually suggesting this. Do you want your bank to know that you buy 30-40 bottles of beer each week? Do you want them to know that you buy medicine for a terminal disease during your visit to discuss a family home loan?

Seems like the store could use your public key to encrypt the data it uploads to your bank, they get the full data, you decrypt it. It's then just using the current channels.

But, I imagine it's easier to have the store make a temporary xml/json file on their servers, give you the QR code to access it, then you can control the data flow from then.

It's important to me to minimize the amount of data leakage as much as I can as a matter of basic self-defense. As a result, I don't want anybody but the store I'm shopping at to have a list of exactly what I've purchased. It's nobody's business except mine and the store's.

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.

My self-service supermarket kiosk has option for "no receipt".

I register with my bonus card and can look all my receipts online.

No need to waste paper. It is 2019 after all.

A QR code or something similar I could scan and get the receipt in csv would fix receipts for me.

Exactly what I want out of a receipt. Exactly.

Just a QR code that translates to a csv of items and their costs.

I don't quite get the bargraph. So it's charting the price of everything relative to the most expensive item in the ticket?

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.

I'm actually not certain what behavior it's meant to incentivize in the 'useful' case.

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.

> 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.

Do you find this an everyday event?

No, just an outlier example. A way to show that graphing things like this would make Tufte's teeth grind.

> So it's charting the price of everything relative to the most expensive item in the ticket?

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://www.tryflux.com/

Irradiate?

eradicate

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 be content if there was an easy way to get the raw itemization info so I could load it into any system I want to do any analysis I want. Instead of breakdowns per trip I could get breakdowns per month or per annum. I could also choose from a variety of visualizations instead of being beholden to whatever is printed on the receipt.

This reminds me of a design competition a few years ago that I saw in a magazine, where prominent designers were hired to redesign the simple, common, every day invoice layout.

The results were a hideous, arty, mess that almost every business surveyed with the samples said were unreadable and would increase the workload on their accounts staff. All they wanted was a simple layout with the invoice number and date somewhere on the top right, then the total amount and the tax breakdown somewhere on the bottom right.

That facilitated data entry into their own accounting system for later processing. If they wanted to query a specific thing on the invoice, that was a secondary consideration, but even then, they wanted things laid out simply so they could find the line item, see the price (and quantity) and the line total. That was it. Something the common, every day invoice layout does well today.

The problems I have with this concept (and this comes from over 20 years of installing Point of Sale systems), is that a lot of POS systems these days still print the receipt items as they are scanned (to save time, I guess). So having the bubble chart at the top would be impossible as you don't have all that data until the entire transaction is finished.

Also, when the customer gets this receipt, the transaction is over. This is after the fact. It is really hard to 'undo' anything, and any learning about spending patterns will be forgotten by the time they next do a shopping run in a few days.

Another thing - I frequently have blow outs in my shopping, but that is usually when I tend to treat myself to a special item, or perhaps purchase a new frying pan etc. as part of my normal food shopping. This would result in a large bubble or bar on my receipt, whilst negating other more important things to a much smaller scale.

For example, last week my fresh veg bar looked like: [======....] but today it looks like [==.......] next to my very expensive tub of foie gras that I impulsively purchased as a treat or for a party. I may have bought the same quantity of vegetables, but visually it looks like I really skimped on them this time around.

I applaud designers such as this OP who try and push the traditional boundaries and expectations, but sometimes, a little more real world experience and application would save everyone a lot of time. This is akin to a non-pilot enthusiastically putting forward and promoting that circular runway idea from a couple of years ago.

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.

Anywhere, and in one of a dozen formats.

The only utility of a receipt for me is just so that I can make returns. Otherwise I simply trash them.

But don't touch the paper!

https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/pft/2016/12/23/is-...

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.

Thermal paper does not use ink, nothing would be wasted even if printing 100% black.

A waste of ink, no, but somewhat a waste of thermal paper.

If we're going to talk about wasting thermal paper CVS should be the company we're going after.

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.

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.

there are other papers from as recent as the early 1990s which were used for receipts, in the US anyway, which also fade.

Interesting seeing so many people asking for digital receipt data.

Cooklist lets you connect your loyalty cards and automatically download all your past and future purchases into one place. (like Mint.com for grocery)

You can see aggregations of all your grocery spending across retailers plus see recipe ideas to cook with the groceries you bought.

We've thought about introducing more advanced visualization of grocery spending or an export tool if anyone is interested.

Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder at https://cooklist.co

What people don't get is:

receipts are not for customers.

They prevent a crooked cashier from pretending to ring something up and pocketing the cash.

Ever seen those signs? "If you didn't get a receipt, your meal is free"

Your assertion doesn't even make 1st base by simply considering cashier = owner, as is the case of many small businesses; it conflates one possible usecase as the only valid usecase.

Receipts favor the business. Even returns help the business.

Receipts may also be required by law (which still supports "the receipt is not for the customer")

Issuing receipts is part of the cost of doing business which requires investments in infrastruture, maintenance, records keeping and reporting. They're a direct liability traceable to and accountable by the business noted.

Furthermore, a business that accepts returns is the cost paid to increase customer confidence; it's called risk mitigation. Any return accepted is revenue rescinded and indirect cost incurred by the business to restock with the aim of winning future conversion.

A business issuing receipts as required by law is a consumer protection mechanism; a business retaining its receipts is for tax compliance.

> They prevent a crooked cashier from pretending to ring something up and pocketing the cash.

How?

A receipt would only be useful for that if the customer diligently looks for an omission. I'll bet that rarely happens. What seems more likely is that the customer will notice that they were charged more than what the total on the receipt said, and will demand that the store refund the "extra charge".

I meant everything you just purchased, not a line item (although that's a clever variation but you might still be caught)

The idea is that there's a history of the transaction in the register to get the receipt (so it happened), and it was handed to someone and they might read it.

I still don't understand how a receipt helps for this use case. Can you explain in a bit more detail?

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.

The visualizations aren't particularly useful, and it creates a longer and thereby slower to scan receipt. Overall, it's a negative to me.

Receipt designs from an employee of a company that does not create receipts, I can't think of better evidence of boredom.

The most helpful receipt redesign is already here at Raley's: print on both sides of the paper.

https://www.raleys.com/news/raleys-register-receipts-go-doub...

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.

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.

I certainly don't want them on my CVS receipts.

I came for a QR code that scanned to some new open standard for receipts. Instead, I am disappointed.

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.

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.

This is a solution to a non-existent problem, and not even a good one.

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 is brilliant, and I hope it gets taken up by some companies.

Sadly, I think some of them are going to look at total printing time, and they're not going to accept longer print times.

I like some of the concepts, but in general this just seems to take more paper (and the side-by-side photo is mildly deceptive by not showing that).

Would be nice if they also didn't print them with thermal transfer ink, which is really bad for you when it gets on your hands (BPA).

That's a really interesting idea. I have to admit, though, that I doubt it would make the receipt any more useful to me.

Why do receipts exist? Why aren't they emailed to the address attached to my card?

Yes! For small transactions less than $20 they are meaningless. I wish there was a mechanism where you had to request a receipt if it was below a threshold like $20

> Why aren't they emailed to the address attached to my card?

I don't know how many people are like me, but no retailer has my email address, and I don't use affinity cards.

I sure wish there was an app, or banking service, that automatically collects receipts.

Where's the tax info? Has this designer ever met an accountant?

Square please send me an itemized email receipt.

this looks expensive.

a good design would be cheaper and make better use of the space - not waste it

I love it and want it!

are they BPA-free ?

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