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Monday, March 08, 2010

Receipts

I'm drowning in a sea of useless receipts. Everywhere I go, everything or every service (well, most) I pay for, they hand over another fucking useless scrap of paper. And I KNOW how much it cost, I just gave you the money, duckey. Is this scrap of faintly printed supposed to constitute proof of purchase should I be accused of shoplifting? Like a 52 year old man with too much disposable income shoplifts. And often in supermarkets they will hand over a bunch of tiny vouchers that allow you to buy your way towards ownership of yet another crappy dinner set or kitchen appliance. No, keep 'em. Give 'em to person behind me, they look like they need a $8 dollar saucepan that is touted as being worth $65. And no I don't need the receipt for parking validation reasons - I have been coming in here 12 times a week for the last 5 years and I have never once answered "Yes" to your question about parking validation, yet you keep asking me! Dude, I don't have car!

I buy a banana for lunch (diet again). Receipt. I buy a Coke Zero. Receipt. For these little purchases, why do they insist on giving me a freaking receipt? Like I'm gonna claim a banana and a coke on my expense account or something.

They're trying to cut back on shopping bags here in Singapore, which is a good thing, yet the shops continue to punch out about 50 million tons of rubbish in the form of useless receipts every 30 secs. Approx.

So today I went to M&S to purchase some thermal underwear for my upcoming ski-holiday in Austria (Dienten am Hochkönig - whereTF?). I found some under-troosers and a long sleeve super-warm vest and bought them.

Mockingly, I tossed the receipt away! Take your silly receipt, I cried, I'll never need it!

~~~~~~~~~~~

The LONG sleeve vest depicted on the package cover is NOT in the package. The SHORT sleeve vest NOT depicted on the package cover is in the package. Sigh.

M&S don't usually take accept returns unless you have the receipt. Ouch.

E@L

8 comments:

HKMacs said...

Karma, mate!

savannah said...

can't you exchange it, sugar, for something else? xoxox

expat@large said...

Woo-hoo, I found the receipt after all! It was in another bag... Now to see if they even HAVE a long sleeve vest.

Momentary Madness said...

Never too rich (it's a hit) to rob; try it and then you can just shag the vest out and rob another one till you're satisfied which yoiu never will be but hey, keep on keeping on;-)

Tom said...

I thought it was mostly for the benefit of the shop's owner: if you have a receipt then the cashier can't pocket the cash without a trace. Same reason they do that stupid thing in bars in SG where you hand over your money and wait bloody ages for somebody else to put it through the till.

expat@large said...

MM: me too rich, just ask my ex.

Tom: fuck, Alley Bar is the worst for that! Takes 45 minutes to get your change!

Very unlikely these days that a POS is not rung up. But I remember the days (shit I'm old) when they would ASK you if you wanted a receipt and then print it out. It's also pretty easy for someone with suitable access to just delete the sale afterwards anyway and then print off a new daily list anyway. Not sure if the receipt numbers would change though. Depends how tightly they're audited whether you'd get away with that. A guy was doing something like that in HK, bled the bar to death then pissed off overseas, leaving his wife and all the investors high and dry.

Lost in Melbourne said...

Someone need to develop a special shredder that reads the date on the paperwork after you dump it into a little bin on top. After the care factor date passes they automatically shred.

Damn receipts are just another part of the over-complication of our current lives.

dibabear said...

When I was in college I briefly worked as a cashier in a supermarket. I came up $20 short one night in the front manager's count and that was that. Come to find out later that the front manager was skimming from the part-time cashier's tills. The owner caught on (eventually) and fired the cow. So no, a receipt doesn't prevent theft.

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