It's Apple's fault I hate receipts. A few years ago, I grabbed some computer accessory off an Apple Store shelf and brought it to the cashier. I pulled out my paper-stuffed Costanza wallet and gave the cashier my card. Then he asked an unexpected question: "Do you want us to e-mail you your receipt?"
I said yes and thus, unwittingly, began a crusade against the paper receipt -- a slip too analog, too temporary and too wasteful to be anything but superfluous. It is a relic of another age -- when record-stuffed filing cabinets lingered in musty basements; when patriarchs sat down with a checkbook on Sunday afternoons while the football game was on; and when we expected to search for things for hours, not seconds. Apple had recognized and made explicit an anachronism of our times. We no longer need a piece of paper to tell us what we bought, just the information that's trapped inside it.
I should be clear that I am not against the idea of the receipt. I am against the piece of paper it comes on. I am against the sly way that it refuses to make its information searchable. I am against its demand that I be the one who files it away -- it should be responsible and find a way to file itself. I understand that consumers and merchants alike need records of what we bought. I just want those to be digital.
Change starts with your credit card
I recently visited an Apple Store again and was reminded just how simple it is to e-mail myself a receipt. Just a scan, a swipe and some questions -- so easy it's hard to understand why we aren't making any progress toward a receiptless utopia. And so the journalistic question was formed: What would it take to trash the receipt?More from MSN Money
This is where the credit card companies come in. First thought: Let's put our e-mail addresses on that magnetic strip on the back of the card. All sorts of other data lives back there, so there's no reason why our e-mail addresses can't as well. I put in a call to four big credit card companies -- American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa -- and all of them either declined comment or did not respond. But I spoke with other experts in the industry, and they say it's possible to pop some more data onto that magnetic strip.
Digitizing would create a gold mine
There are, of course, privacy concerns about putting even more personal information onto a piece of plastic that already holds far too much. (Note that the issue isn't giving the card companies our e-mail addresses in the first place, as they probably already have them. It's just embedding them in the cards.)
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Plus, we may not want each merchant we visit to get our e-mail addresses, especially without the sellers explicitly asking for them. And we'd need to figure out a way to stop them from keeping our information, which would entail getting the credit card industry's standards council involved, which would only slow things down. So, a compromise: Let's not have our receipts e-mailed to us. Let's just have them digitized.
Under that scenario, the credit card companies (or the banks that offer the cards) would index our receipts online. We'd log into, say, visa.com/receipts and see a list of all of our purchases, just as we do now when we do online banking. But then you could click on the purchase and see its receipt. Now you have a digital copy that eliminates the need for a paper one.
This is a gold mine for whoever runs the site, should the company be brazen enough to profit off your personal data. A digest of all your purchases is tailor-made for targeted advertising. Now the bank or credit card company will know not just that you shop at Whole Foods, but also that its Two-Bite Brownies are a regular buy. Cue the coupon for brownie mix from Trader Joe's.
Continued: How likely is a receipt-free future?
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