Receipts the length of my arm

You buy a bottle of water. The shop prints a document. The document is longer than a napkin. Three lines from the top it says, politely, water, 85p. Below that there is a map of your loyalty balance, an invitation to install the app, a QR code to the survey, a reminder of the opening hours in the branch at Bournemouth, and a thank-you from the regional manager. The receipt itself is on a type of paper that is almost impossible to recycle because of its coating. You walk out with a souvenir of a transaction you had already completed.

At a certain point in the last few years, the receipt crossed over from being a record of what you had bought to being an opportunity. Every major chain now treats the ribbon of thermal paper as a billboard. The question is not why; the question is why you should participate.

What changed

Two things, mostly. Loyalty systems became cheaper to run, so every chain signed up to one, and the receipt became the quickest way to tell a customer their balance without emailing them. Loyalty, for many chains, is a legal argument: if the customer is part of a scheme, data protection is easier to defend because there is a membership relationship.

The second thing is that the till software that prints the receipt is written by about six companies worldwide. Each new feature those companies release gets rolled out to most of their customers. One company adds a rate your visit line. Six months later every café in the country is asking you to rate the visit.

Why the paper is bad

Standard thermal paper is coated with a chemical called bisphenol-A or a replacement with a similar name. The coating is what makes the print appear when heat is applied. It also makes the paper hard to recycle, and there have been slow regulatory changes in the last few years to move the industry to safer coatings. For now, most of the receipts in your wallet are going to landfill, however virtuous the shop.

If you are a small business owner printing a lot of receipts, newer rolls with safer coatings exist. They cost slightly more. You will not get marketing credit for using them. That is fine; you are not meant to.

If you would not frame it, you do not need to carry it home.

Small escapes

• Say "no receipt". Almost every till now has a button for this. You do not have to explain. You do not need a reason. The cashier has no feelings about it. For things under a few pounds, this is almost always the right answer.
• Pick email if you must have one. Email receipts are better than paper for anything you might need to produce later: electricals, warranty goods, business expenses. They are also searchable in a way that an envelope full of thermal paper is not.
• Carry a small notebook for the things that matter. For a business expense diary or a VAT return, a one-line pencil note is a perfectly legal record, backed up by the bank statement. The receipt is one way to prove the transaction; it is not the only way.
• Keep paper for the things paper is good for. Hardware shops, chemists, anything with a return window that is more than fourteen days. These are the receipts worth keeping. Everything else is a hazard to your coat pockets.

When you really do need the receipt

For a return under the Consumer Rights Act, a receipt helps but is not strictly required: proof of purchase is what the law talks about, and that can be a bank statement, an email confirmation or the box. Which? has a plain summary. For a parking appeal, keep the pay-and-display ticket even if it is on your phone, because the appeals process on GOV.UK runs on timestamps and a tenpenny ticket is sometimes the whole case.

If you buy anything expensive, take the little picture. Photograph the receipt on the shop counter before you leave. It will save you ten minutes of digging about at home three weeks later when the fridge starts making the noise.

And the rating request

The invitation to rate the branch is almost always a scheme internal to the chain, used to measure the performance of staff you have never met. Do not do it on autopilot. If you had a lovely visit, take the two minutes and leave a kind word, because it will land on the person who helped you. If you had a bad visit, do not punish the cashier for the company’s systems. Write a note to the company instead; use the word complaint and name the branch and the time. That lands in a different inbox and gets someone paid attention.

The quietly cheaper shop

The next time you are in a small shop that hands you a one-line receipt with the price and the date, with no survey, no QR code and no essay from the regional manager, notice it. Nothing has forced them to give you that. They have chosen to, because they think the dignity of the transaction is more important than another chance to market to you. Those shops are rarer every year. They deserve a return visit.

At the big chain where the receipt is a metre long, say no to it next time. Nothing bad will happen. You will not need to prove you bought the water. The receipt will go into a bin somewhere, eventually. Everyone involved will be, by a small amount, a little less tired. And the next column is about another queue.