Email Receipts

Have you ever made a small purchase in a store and wound up with a receipt that was several feet long?

Well that exact thing has happened to me recently at a local retailer. It is rather embarrassing to be handed such a long receipt when somebody only buys a couple of items.

So what do you get in all that footage of paper?

· Name of store

· Address of store

· Phone number of store

· Name of manager of store

· Company or store’s email address

· Transaction information (date, time, transaction #, register #, cashier employee # or name, etc.)

· A listing of products that you purchased including any discounts

· Type of payment including any authorization number if it was any form other than cash

· The company’s return policy

· A customer satisfaction survey request including information needed to access either a website or a phone number plus any codes needed to complete the survey

· A friendly closing like “Have a nice day”

Certainly some receipts may even have other things than this including rebate information or coupons for future purchases or other items.

With all this information and the spacing between items, it is easy to get a receipt that could easily be measured in feet not inches.

Now companies like Macy’s has decided to adopt another way to save paper: the email receipt.

While this sounds great on the surface, in reality it is full of red flags and gotchas that they don’t tell you about.

First the good news or not so good news, if you opt for an email receipt only you walk out of the store with no receipt. This works great if you just so happened to walk into another store and the security alarm goes off and you have no receipt. Expect to spend some time with store or mall security without that receipt.

So you save paper then what?

If you are like me, then any number of scenarios could happen.

Here are just some of them:

The cashier types your email address wrong so you never receive the receipt. One wrong character could send your email to the wrong recipient. This could lead to the potential of identity theft especially since the recipient of the email could acquire credit card information from the receipt. Are you listening Google?

The email is sent but ends up in your spam inbox and not your regular inbox. With some email systems, chances are that the email may get deleted before you ever get it. In other words, the email system blocks the email from entering your system because it was predetermined by the email system to be spam.

Your email address is sold to third parties without your consent. By accepting an email receipt, you are probably subjecting yourself to a privacy policy that allows the store to do whatever they want with your email address. Just try asking the cashier what their privacy policy is and expect to get blank stare.

Of course, the worst of all is that you could delete the email by mistake and find out later that you really need that receipt. Good luck if you paid cash.

Overall, I would never give my email address to receive an email receipt. If I don’t have physical receipt in my hand at time of purchase, I would never be happy.

I don’t know of how many stores have started this procedure, but I feel it is dangerous one at best. So far I have seen this at Macy’s only and even lately they have been bypassing this prompt at the register to “paper receipt only”. Maybe they have already had complaints like the ones listed above.

As far as I know to date, Staples has not started any sort of email receipt program or testing any sort of program. Given their past with how they handled my email address with rewards cards, I hope they never even think of this procedure. EVER!

Consider yourself warned…