Slashdot Mirror
The Long, Long History of Long, Long CVS Receipts (vox.com)
Why is a receipt for cough drops the height of a small child? Rachel Sugar, writing for Vox: CVS is a drugstore much like other drugstores, with one important difference: The receipts are very long. How long are the receipts? For at least a decade, concerned shoppers have dedicated themselves to this question, producing a robust body of phone-picture literature on the subject. You could not major in CVS receipt studies, probably, but you could minor.
Not all CVS receipts are created equal. 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). To get one of the iconically long CVS receipts, you need to use your ExtraCare card, which means you need to be an ExtraCare member. (You can join as long as you are willing to turn over your name and phone number in exchange for better deals.) People on the internet have documented this phenomenon with a vigor usually reserved for cats climbing in and out of boxes. On Twitter and on Instagram, shoppers stand next to their CVS receipts, which are often as tall as they are, and sometimes taller.
Not all CVS receipts are created equal. 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). To get one of the iconically long CVS receipts, you need to use your ExtraCare card, which means you need to be an ExtraCare member. (You can join as long as you are willing to turn over your name and phone number in exchange for better deals.) People on the internet have documented this phenomenon with a vigor usually reserved for cats climbing in and out of boxes. On Twitter and on Instagram, shoppers stand next to their CVS receipts, which are often as tall as they are, and sometimes taller.
Slashdot is advertising CVS loyalty cards now?
Holy shit
Or you can just get your receipts by email and skip the paper altogether.
Oh, the pharmacy CVS, not the Code Versioning System some of us remember.
Is the idea of long receipts at an American pharmacy newsworthy now? Does this have any tie in to tech at all?
Not only as the article describes, but if you dare purchase something that is considered "beauty" (nail clippers), you suddenly get useless coupons for Maybelline eyeshadow and other makeup products. I (a male) also received coupons for Monistat LOL I'm dead. It's funny, but frustrating as most of their coupons are just useless.
I thought this was going to be about revision control tickets or some shit.
Walmart will give you receipts of varying length. Home Depot and Lowes also.
Since Walgreens is in the same business, they fear no receipt.
Supermarkets in the US are legendary for receipts, but these are itemized, so that's understandable. Many (and Walgreens) print additional offers and coupons. You may not have room in the bag for those. JK.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Thermal paper rolls are cheap.
Thermal printers are damn fast.
It's unnecessary, but also inevitable that some moron would take it too far on the "just give them all the coupons" front. I'm more concerned about the waste of paper and what the checkouts must look like because for sure I wouldn't touch that receipt and would leave it inside the store.
I know from experience though - I wrote a piece of software that produces a firelist for my employer. We needed a quick "who's supposed to be here now" list, and the software that controls the access control has all the necessary information to tell us but just won't churn it out in a compact enough form.
I put in a little test system with a thermal printer (no ink, quick printing, cheap to run) and when the fire alarm goes off, it churns out a list of my choosing.
It was so successful that over time I was asked to list every member of staff, whether they were in or not, the time they last tagged in/out, plus the people who aren't even supposed to be here, plus all the temporary visitors, plus the other sites, plus.... and then do it twice at both ends of the site so the duty of checking it can be split and we have a "backup".
It still only takes about 3-4 seconds (1ms processing time, the rest is sheer print-time) to churn out a complete list (which is longer than it takes to realise the alarm is genuine), but the list is now over 6 feet long.
Usually I check the paper reels immediately after any fire drill/alert because it uses up so much paper, but it's a good backup to any electronic system and churns out fast enough that you could grab it in a real fire (it's safer to grab that, than to try to check that everyone you think might be outside are - by the time you check anything else, they're already dead, but it takes seconds to skim the highlighted / obvious / simplified list of names and see who's missing).
I'm waiting for the ironic day that what catches fire is the thermal printer itself, or something nearby, and which just keeps feeding more and more paper into it to fuel it...
Every time I get a massive ream of receipts, I stand there and make the person behind me wait while I look at them to see if there's anything good in it. There never is, so I tear that crap off and essentially throw it at the cashier. (I am more likely to literally toss it on the checkstand, but eh.) If everyone did that, it would slow things down enough and they would be throwing away enough additional trash to where they'd stop issuing massive receipts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I rarely shop at the local CVS, but when I do the guy typically tells me I could have saved $$$ if I had a loyalty card. I just reply that that is the reason I hardly ever shop there.
Nullius in verba
Libtards may have acquired disposable income solely due to their white privilege, but even in the whining Libtard states, where most of the homeless population is located, many people shop by the coupons. Maybe CVS could just implement a custom option to not print the coupons on the receipt. But then again, libtards would feel left out of the deals and complain about that.
Cats climbing in and out of boxes are awesome.
The summary doesn't indicate that it was user submitted, so I'll assume that msmash found and posted it.
I'll grant you that this is pretty lame. This is the kind of story that should have been tossed into idle.
What's the problem? If wasted paper is your complaint - these customer directed ad+coupon are much better than the useless weekly junk mail pamphlets that just get tossed by almost everyone.
Want a short receipt? Cut the coupons off, there, short receipt. First world problems.
I was hoping for a rant with how Excel handles comma value separated files. Rather than using a normal escape character, they double quotes and have other funky rules.
It's nearly impossible to parse a CVS file.
He will have to make do with the prison dispensary for his Rogaine, before the hangman comes for his orange ass.
nearly impossible to parse a CVS file
And a comma-separated value (CSV) file is only sightly easier.
Supposedly there are coupons on the receipt.
I never look at it and toss it.
Fortunately, I use the phone number 867-5309, which always works.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
CVS will email your receipt instead of printing it. This is a non-issue.
That should give you a long, long.... receipt as well
Do you mean CSV? The rules that Python applies to read and write tab- and comma-separated values compatible with Microsoft Excel aren't that funky. If a value contains a double quote, the delimiter (tab or comma), or a newline, double all double quotes and wrap the value with quotes. That's it. The SQL standard also does escaping by doubling up single quotes.
I wrote a PHP CSV reader/writer that applied the same rule (because I was having trouble with fgetcsv() at the time), and it interoperated with both Excel and Python. But by the time I got a job that required manipulating CSV files, the programming world had moved on from Concurrent Versions System to Subversion, as Git's "porcelain" (the VCS built on top of its storage layer) hadn't matured yet.
Thermal paper rolls are cheap.
Cheap is a relative term. Cheap in relation to what exactly? And frankly it doesn't matter. What matters is whether these long receipts are generating enough additional profits to justify printing them. If they result in additional sales which results in even modest additional profits then it's perhaps worthwhile. But perhaps they could generate the same results with less waste and thus less cost in a different way.
Honestly it seems pretty wasteful and I have a hard time imagining that they couldn't get the same results for less cost if they could be bothered to try.
I rarely shop at the local CVS, but when I do the guy typically tells me I could have saved $$$ if I had a loyalty card. I just reply that that is the reason I hardly ever shop there.
And not a single fuck was given by the cashier.
Wrong audience for that message.
How about instead of printing out all these coupons and wasting paper, as well as requiring the customer to remember the coupon next time they visit the store...
Why not just automatically apply any discounts the customer is eligible for, identified by their loyalty card?
Or better yet, don't require a physical loyalty card and recognise repeat customer by their payment cards (of which you can store a hash instead of the actual card details), so you don't have to carry around a stack of different loyalty cards for the different places you use.
It's not like the stores aren't already taking, storing and cross referencing this data, might as well use the data to provide something that's actually useful to the customer.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I assume the ultimate goal is to get people into the store with coupons. Coupons attached to the receipt might be the most efficient way of providing coupons a person's likely to use. Other stores likely do this though CVS may be taking it to an extreme.
I've seen this at other stores. So it isn't fake news. Is there a technology problem that I should try to solve?
Is there a problem? Maybe a I should read the Vox article.
But I don't care.
Which add to the overall length of the bills. Top portion remains identical to its member-less brethren.
Have your receipt emailed to you... problem solved.
Go to Safeway, Lucky, Albertsons, Grocery Outlet, get a receipt that's 2 to 3 times longer than it has to be.
Or Fry's Electronics with their 4-inch wide receipts where each item purchased is detailed in 4 to 8 lines each and receipts for just an armful of items were at least 4 feet long, and if you bought a computer, you received a bonus 2-4 page laser-printed Letter-sized receipt.
I always wondered why Fry's Electronics was able to sell reams, boxes, pallets and truckloads of paper at such ridiculously low prices. It must be because they got a huge discount because they also use so much.
One of the reasons I won't accept emailed receipts is because they result in normal mail bouncing because mailbox is full. But it's hard to scan the long receipts, too. Fortunately, datapunch is still a viable option.
I signed up the first chance I could. Haven't seen a CVS receipt in a year.
I think the biggest thing that makes it stupid/funny is that it's CVS ... where everything is so expensive.
I mean let's face it, with most stores I'd love to get a bunch of good coupons on stuff thrown at me all the time.
But with CVS, even with a great coupon, an item might be ... the same price as at another store. And I'm not going to carry around a wad of crinkly register coupons for that.
...a clothes iron. The print will reappear.