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
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?
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 $$$ if I had a loyalty card. I just reply that that is the reason I hardly ever shop there.
Nullius in verba
Cats climbing in and out of boxes are awesome.
The summary doesn't indicate that it was user submitted, so I'll assume that msmash found and posted it.
I'll grant you that this is pretty lame. This is the kind of story that should have been tossed into idle.
What's the problem? If wasted paper is your complaint - these customer directed ad+coupon are much better than the useless weekly junk mail pamphlets that just get tossed by almost everyone.
Want a short receipt? Cut the coupons off, there, short receipt. First world problems.
I was hoping for a rant with how Excel handles comma value separated files. Rather than using a normal escape character, they double quotes and have other funky rules.
It's nearly impossible to parse a CVS file.
nearly impossible to parse a CVS file
And a comma-separated value (CSV) file is only sightly easier.
Supposedly there are coupons on the receipt.
I never look at it and toss it.
Fortunately, I use the phone number 867-5309, which always works.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Thermal paper rolls are cheap.
Cheap is a relative term. Cheap in relation to what exactly? And frankly it doesn't matter. What matters is whether these long receipts are generating enough additional profits to justify printing them. If they result in additional sales which results in even modest additional profits then it's perhaps worthwhile. But perhaps they could generate the same results with less waste and thus less cost in a different way.
Honestly it seems pretty wasteful and I have a hard time imagining that they couldn't get the same results for less cost if they could be bothered to try.
I rarely shop at the local CVS, but when I do the guy typically tells me I could have saved $$$ 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.
I am often regarded as being a cheap bastard, but even I don't try to shop using coupons. Sure... if I actually need something, and there happens to be a coupon easily available for that thing that I already determined that I need, I'll use a coupon. But experience tells me it isn't very likely to happen.
The coupons I get in the mail and on receipts are almost always for things that I don't need, don't want, and typically don't buy. The "Value Pack" that comes in the mail goes straight to recycling for that reason. Could 'clipping coupons' ever pay me back the time to clip, sort, store, and retrieve the coupons in the first place? Am I really saving money when I get $0.50 off of something I probably wouldn't have bought in the first place? I've found that I spent a lot less money once I stopped reading the Sunday paper (where 50% of the bulk is advertising material of one sort or another). [Yes, this dates me somewhat now that newspapers have practically ceased to exist as physical artifacts.] Show me a coupon where I can save 10% or even 25%, and I'll show you a way to save 100%.
I think the trick of the "coupon game" is to get people thinking that they are "winning" by saving money using a coupon (or a store loyalty card) while eliminating the critical thinking of whether they actually need the item in question (or whether a cheaper alternative like a generic is available). It seems like something thought up by people like this: https://blog.vendhq.com/post/64901826173/encourage-impulse-buys-store-deeper-look-unplanned-purchases. Perhaps part of the underlying process is converting a "do I need this" decision into a trade-off analysis (with low cognitive effort required for the trade-off analysis); the "buy it or don't buy it" comparison becomes "which one of these is the better deal" comparison. The latter is much more easily solved than the former when you have a 25% off coupon!
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'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.
Have your receipt emailed to you... problem solved.
Coupons work well for items you can by in bulk at Coscto and Sams. I time my toilet paper purchases around those coupons :)
Buy a pregnancy test and see what that does to your receipts and for how long.
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.
Maybe people with disposable income reached that fortunate situation by buying from companies that give them great value all the time, not merely when they can dig through a bag full of shit and find the one magical coupon.