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California Lawmaker Wants to Ban Paper Receipts, Require Digital Ones (cnbc.com)
A California assemblyman has introduced a law barring retailers from printing paper receipts unless a customer requests one. Otherwise they'd be required to provide proof-or-purchase receipts "only in electronic form."
: An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: Stores that give out printed receipts without first being asked by the customer could be subject to fines [of $25 per day, up to $300 per year].... Proponents of the bill say the legislation would help reduce waste as well as contaminants in the recycling stream from toxins often used to coat the paper-based receipts... Up to 10 million trees and 21 billion gallons of water are used annually in the U.S. to create receipts, according to Green America, a green ecology organization. It said receipts annually generate 686 million pounds of waste and 12 billion pounds of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of 1 million cars on the road...
Then again, the use of electronic receipts raises some privacy concerns since retailers usually require an email address for an electronic receipt and companies will then be able to potentially track and collect more data about customers.
If the bill passes, digital receipts would become California's default option on January 1, 2022.
: An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: Stores that give out printed receipts without first being asked by the customer could be subject to fines [of $25 per day, up to $300 per year].... Proponents of the bill say the legislation would help reduce waste as well as contaminants in the recycling stream from toxins often used to coat the paper-based receipts... Up to 10 million trees and 21 billion gallons of water are used annually in the U.S. to create receipts, according to Green America, a green ecology organization. It said receipts annually generate 686 million pounds of waste and 12 billion pounds of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of 1 million cars on the road...
Then again, the use of electronic receipts raises some privacy concerns since retailers usually require an email address for an electronic receipt and companies will then be able to potentially track and collect more data about customers.
If the bill passes, digital receipts would become California's default option on January 1, 2022.
California... where you shit in the street, find a state funded safehouse to shoot up, enter the country illegally and be protected, and knowingly give someone AIDS without any repercussions... but don't you dare use a plastic straw or a paper receipt.
(1) Paper receipts should be required if the customer asks
(2) Electronic receipts shouldn't require the customer to provide any information other than an email address ("burner" emails are easy to get).
Of course, this is only a proposal -- lots of things get proposed in CA without many of them actually becoming law.
...for the iPhone and internet connection needed to go digital I'd go along with it.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I got a five feet long receipt/coupon today.
Ok, so they're going to force everyone to have a smart phone or laptop to bring to the store or other locations as proof of purchase?
Do they think everyone has one or can afford to have one?
Is that better than a small piece of paper, both recyclable and convenient?
Is receipt waste a big issue in California?
Are they really thinking this through?
You know, the more I hear of stories like this out of California, the more I think Lex Luthor had the right idea in 1978 Superman movie.
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
CVS Receipts refers to point-of sale records printed by CVS Pharmacy, the largest pharmacy chain in the United States, which have gained online notoriety for their lengthy form since the introduction of ExtraCare rewards program in 2011.
It's one thing to encourage companies to reduce environmental impacts, but a law that attaches a penalty is just bound to increase cost of doing business and the cost of living in California. These sorts of laws are ripe for abuse by petty bureaucrats who want power. My own town in Keene, New Hampshire has a major problem with bureaucrats and power trips and we're not nearly as bad as California. ie Just go search for Pho Keene Great and you'll know what I'm talking about.
What a surprise!
Come tax time, the thermal printed paper ones are just blank.
A lot of stores have employees/guards check receipts as customers exit. How is this going to work if it passes? Will the employee have tablet and somehow receive their checkout information? Will it involve even more tracking? RFIDs on shopping carts?
I remember when democrats were all against computers because of the Digital Divide⦠They seem to have forgotten a lot in 15 years.
Well those that are still hanging on against Walmart and Amazon.
It's funny I had someone here (likely from California or New York) go on at me how people don't make good decision's for themselves.
This just shows you how really bad politicians making decisions for them can be.
I would love to see Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada wage a war of conquest over California. Let the victors receive the spoils. The winners would get to rape all the hot California beach babes. They would also get access to all the smart people that are living in Silicon valley The winners could force the smart Asians to build new and better weapons so that they could continue to wage more wars.
This would could end 99% of the silliness coming out of California. Silly problems disappear when real problems arise.
Who is with me. Let's get a petition started to invade California. Kill all the males and give the females over as brides to the conquerors.
War, and starvation are the engines of evolution.
Actually thinking about it some more, this has already happened. Mexico has already invaded and conquered California. What we need now is a reconquest of California by USAians.
Might makes right. Darwin if king
The idea of these receipts is to force merchants to declare sales and pay taxes. Without receipts, they could not register the sales in the cash register and avoid paying taxes - they didn't sell anything hence no tax paid.
I need a receipt and there is no way in H*** you are getting my email.
Photocopy the receipt a day or two after purchase and staple the receipt to the copy before the paper receipt fades.
From someone who gets audited and passes. Auguring with the IRS never goes well, and they don't give a damn if you are right. If you are right, you get the privilege of paying an attorney to prove you are right.
this is just another way to collect data - now includes those who pay in cash. one thing for sure, it will make checking out a whole lot slower if you have to type or voice your email address. It means you could also be forced to sign up for some type of loyalty cards. so just say no and ask for paper.
I found some thermal receipts the other day from 2013 - they're all fine. The new ones disappear in six months.
Somebody told me it's because of a BPA ban, but I'm not sure. I haven't tried eating any of the new ones.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Did any think of the privacy situation of never been able to buy anything with cash again without a digital recored kept?
Paper receipts ensure your privacy to buy anything you want without getting tracked on another device.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I think that ass-emblyman is an utter idiot, high on "green" kool-aid that's actually worse than we have now.
The true cost of paper receipts isn't in the paper. Just like letters and much else paper. For paper is reliable, dependable, cheap, and well-understood technology that can be had from sustainable sources and recycled into itself or a myriad other things. Electronic trash, by contrast, mostly just ends up in landfills in some other shithole country, leaching heavy metals into the groundwater if you're unlucky. Not to mention the nasty chemicals used in making electronics. Chemical trash that can no longer be openly burned at sea, so it get mixed in with the heavy fuel oil fueling tankers. It still ends up in the environment. And so on, and so forth.
I'm pretty sure that if you look at the full picture, the paper is a net win in "green". But such conclusions don't help an ass-emblyman bent on looking good and green. And to him, the bottom line is counted in votes, not in actual results.
Plus handling them results in high blood levels of synthetic estrogen analogs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It still astonishes me that credit card companies haven't improved on this yet - statements are still cryptic line-items that sometimes lead to chargebacks because people don't remember/can't figure out what it's exactly for, nor is there some electronic means to verify the charge to some type of virtual receipt produced at the time of purchase.
AC comments get piped to
"California Lawmaker wants to ban paper receipts entirely, nationalize shopper tracking"
Summary: It's important that we save millions of trees each year and also understand shopping habits so that we can later roll out a fully government controlled food economy. There's just too much choice in the inherently unstable marketplace and people can't be trusted to make their own decisions.
I'm sensing a conflict here for large purchases.
no. but the company will have a data breach or other 'incident' and won't be able to verify that the 'digital' one is unaltered and accurate, so they won't accept it anyway for a return or when the irs comes a knocking to verify during an extended audit.
Trees pull CO2 from the air to produce wood. The tree is cut down and the wood is pulped to form paper, which is then used to print the receipt. If the receipt is subsequently thrown away in a landfill, doesn't that remove CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it underground?
"Yea welfare red states, that is funny" - It's a fact. What's "funny" is that your faggoty redneck traitors can't pay their bills, and more coal mines have closed under Trump than any other President. #Winning prison!
This would make every money transaction traceable as every receipt would have to be digitally signed and verified by a public key registered to the business.
This is tracking everything.
never been able to buy anything with cash again
That's the idea. Cash is on the way out. All purchases will be tracked (now) and approved (in the future). According to your needs (as determined by The State).
Have gnu, will travel.
Just like some stores refusing cash for purchases, this will adversely affect the poorest members of society.
Remember when Radio Shack was mocked ruthlessly here for years for wanting all your info just to buy batteries? Lets all welcome our new Democrat overlords!
This isn't rocket science... if you purchase with a credit card, Home Depot ALREADY DOES this.
If you want to return things:
* Give the items you want to return to the clerk.
* Clerk scans the items, and gives back all the stuff you bought at Lowes and forgot where it came from.
* You swipe all the credit cards you might have used to purchase the returned items.
* Home Depot uses the card data to look for receipts associating a purchase of one or more returned items using that card, and automatically credits the price back to the card.
* For everything else, you provide your ID, and they give you a store credit (the ID is needed to limit the ability to brazenly shoplift items and return them later... if you start returning TOO MANY big-ticket items without a receipt, they'll restrict your ability to get receipt-free refunds of cash purchases in the future.
At least in Canada anyway. It's been that way for a number of years now.
I've made it a habit to ask for a receipt when I see a clerk not printing one off for me. Usually he or she will ask and that's an invariable "yes" from me in response. I either toss it in the trash (yep, the trash) or it winds up going in my to shred pile at home, which also winds up in the trash eventually, or the fireplace.
I WANT that written record, even if I don't always need it.
Probably time to stock up on and learn to use the three seashells!
Would be for it to be implemented at the bank/credit union level. They already have your email, it shouldn't be hard for them to either send you an email or just keep the virtual receipt in their system for 5 years.
They can be recycled. Ban the thermal receipts. Why should citizens be forced to provide email to have receipts sent? Opens us all up to SPAM, identity theft, etc.
1) All digital banking.
2) Shady algorithms to maximize bank fees.
3) All digital receipts.
4) Shady algorithms to round up to target profit margins when banks and merchant account providers (other banks, basically) start colluding.
5) Years/decades/forever of people being perpetually poor as the algorithms decide how much they need of their own money before they would otherwise sue.
A receipt really details total expense and the total taxes. It would be easy to change the current EFTPOS system to include that sub-total. In the real world, many receipts also include the invoice, which is a much larger chunk of data.
We have digital cash, in the form of an ATM card. We need a digital wallet to hold digital receipts. For integrity, it could be parallel to the current EFTPOS system, with the bank receiving a receipt (via the payment processor) they can't decrypt. Then it's something that can't be targeted for spam, or sold as tracking data.
Digital cash was originally envisioned to be contained in portable, digital wallets: As something that could be moved from digital wallet to digital wallet. So a digital wallet (containing digital cheques) would be a great step towards monetary privacy. That's something the government doesn't want consumers to have.
Cant wait until the ffirst receipt is faked...
You think there's no record when it's a cash payment? You are very stupid.
Give the store the email address of assemblymember Phil Ting who proposed the bill assemblymember.ting@assembly.ca.gov. No inconvenience at all.
Buying a book, music, a political meme as art work is still a bit more private with cash than a direct connection to a smart phone AC.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Since a few years here in Québec/Canada, Restaurants are obligated by law to give a paper receipt in hand even if the customer doesn't want it. They need to throw it out themselves if they don't want it. A special section is added to the receipt by the black box of the gouvernement and they don't even compensate for the additional paper and wear and tear of the printer! Inspectors are visiting restaurants and handing out penalties if those laws are not respected... Total Opposite...
I'd rather see a law that had a max length per line items. If you only buy 2-3 items the receipt should be a small stub not a 3 foot long monstrosity.
Not only stored, but how do I know I've "collected" all my receipts at the end of the year (or up to seven years later), and, most importantly, will the IRS accept these during an audit?
--- Keep the choice with the user..
This idiot apparently thinks that everybody is as tethered to electronic pacifiers as he and his idiot friends are.
There are millions of Americans who do NOT walk around with brain-killing "smartphones" aneasthetizing them. Not everybody is in a position to accept an "electronic receipt" and there's certainly no Constitutional requirement that all Americans become slaves to shiny baubles made by Apple or Samsing.
It's less and less surprising to see the huge political gap opening up between the zombies in the big cities and everybody else. The former fancy themselves super-smart but would be unable to feed themselves and get safe drinking water, to say nothing of clothing and shelter, if their big city systems ever failed - they're really less equipped to live as independent adult humans than the average 12 year old was a century ago. California's government has become quite a hallucinatory freak show in the past few years. These people would die of panic if they could not get to Facebook or Google on their phones.
I'm not giving any company my email or phone number. If you want to give me a digital receipt then it must be a QR code that I scan at the POS; otherwise fuck you!
They give you a ticket to redeem your clothes. Will that be considered a receipt? There could be many edge cases like this which will have unintended consequences. Forcing mom and pop businesses to no paper receipts will increase their costs, setup and maintain paperless system, and put them at a disadvantage to the big boys who'll only take local money out of the area. What about rural areas with poor cellular and wired internet access? How will they give a digital receipt to customers.
Yep. Because we have such a good history with completely electronic systems. Where physical access allows pretty much anyone to do anything.
And no paper trail means that it's just that much easier to cheat.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No thank you. And don't tell me the law could prohibit using the email address for marketing. When has that ever stopped them?
-- Will program for bandwidth
Does paper contain lead or other heavy metals? No. Does your electronics contain lead and/or other heavy metals? Hell yeah.
Paper doesn't use any electricity once it's been printed. Your electronics need electricity all the time, and that means you're polluting once more.
These tree huggers need to get an actual education on trees. Real conservationists know that you prune trees from time to time to keep them healthy. I chop my trees down to just above my head level every single year, and every year they grow right back again, as big and strong as ever. There is no need to try to reduce the use of tree products to save trees when trees simply grow right back again.
Demanding that the poor and homeless pay up to go digital. Like that is epic. Maybe they should be told to eat cake as well.
Could NFC technology be used for delivering a digital receipt to your phone without you having to hand over your email address (and thus get spammed)? It would also be a lot faster than waiting in line for people to spell out their email addresses.
Any time I'm asked for my email address so they can send me the receipt, I refuse. And I'll continue to refuse. So if this is to be forced, then a better way than email or SMS is needed.
Oh, and can you guys sort out those CVS receipts, as that one chain is probably responsible for half of all receipt paper...!
Paper usually decompose quite well , and most of it return to the atmosphere under the form of CO2, possibly methane both which are not sequestered, it just seep up. But the whole cutting wood, pulping it, producing paper cutting it to rolls, producing ink, delivering that ink/paper, all cost CO2. So this is not carbon neutral, even if your paper was not decomposing.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
10 million trees just to print receipts. They completely logged the side of a lake we are on for 42 miles. Even if someone of the paper is made from recycled paper, I refused to use paper towels to dry my hands. Your hands dry anyway. Shake the water off your hands and then give your arms a moisturizer as you walk out of the washroom.
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I've got receipts from 10-20 years ago, and ones from just a year or less ago.
If you get them out in full sunlight they can fade out within a few days. Some will 'brown' causing outlines of some of the text to still be visible, but the majority will fade to white.
On the other hand, not all that different from optical writeable media, if you keep them in the dark and relatively cool, you can dig them out a few years later and they will look just as good as new.
Really, *ANY* light on them seems to fade them. I am not sure if it s a certain amount of exposure, or a certain time, but if they are exposed to light (possibly ONLY sunlight) they will fade to white.
When mechanical tills were first introduced, shopworkers would ring up the wrong amounts and pocket the difference. So they introduced a till roll. That didn't stop the fraud until they gave the customer a copy, since then the customer would complain if the receipt showed the wrong amount. (Any benefit to the customer's right to complain was probably incidental).
We're already seeing electronic receipts a lot in the UK. At least I get asked if I want a paper receipt. And email ones make sense for "click and collect" purchases where they already have my email address.
the $300/year max fine is just a way to effectively tax all the large companies that see paper receipts as a good way to advertise to you. do you think CVS really cares about spending $300/year to keep printing 26" receipts filled with ads?
Who voted for that idiot?
Auguring with the IRS never goes well
Which animal would you recommend for reading its entrails?
Yeah, how terrible is it that we have a few liberal states? We need ALL of the country to be 100% in lockstep with whatever Rush Limbaugh says. Anything other than that would be terrible. Imagine... People with different ideas and different ways of life living in the same country? Madness! We really should just have one political party, and kick out anybody who doesn't agree. Great idea.
I don't respond to AC's.
I don't have a smartphone to "get" the receipt, I want to keep "classified" my email (right ! - now every shop can be "cracked" and more chances of span), so I have to buy an USB stick to get the receipt on it.
Do the shop allow for an USB to be used ?
Do the shop have a soft to vizualize my receipt if I return item ?
Do I believe they won't "peek" to my other receipts, after all they can copy all my receipts and create a profile, no (?), after all this is the world after...
Well, my only clear and also classical is to get a paper receipt, and since as always it is perishable I will have to make a "xerox" type copy on a paper who will resist for an year or more... (some warranties are 2-3-5 years !).
What a wonderfull waste of time (was this ideea submitted on paper?) !
So I know there are some NFC security factors what probably need to be tightened up before I want something pushed to my phone, but isn't this a perfect opportunity for NFC on the pay terminal? We already have CC terminals with touch to pay. As a first step, well before we start mandating and/or banning anything, what about passing contactless payment receipts back to the customer's device and then displaying it? Second step, even for CC contact payments the customer would hold their phone to the terminal and get the receipt.
Just an idea of how to do it without giving out email addresses, which take time, rubs me the wrong way, and does seem like a bigger add to the terminals than NFC.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
I mean go buy an item from any large grocery store and pay with a card, and you can't get away without having like 3 bits of completely useless paper forced on you.
That badly needs to end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
#DeleteFacebook
I don't agree with making a cellphone mandatory for shopping, but people have to make receipts that are safe for handing and disposal. I've lost too many people to cancer to disregard its causes.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
When I shop, I take the pragmatic approach; I don't want a relationship with you. I'm giving you CASH tangible goods like bread, cheese, and milk. The push for a cashless society is is borne out of one of control, not convenience. Retailers have to pay merchant fees and and most still prefer cash. I prefer cash. I don't use supermarket loyalty cards and never will. The odd time when I have to shop at Kroger because they have something I need that nod other vendor has, I notice that even when I say "no" to the loyalty card, the cashier still scans the store's card to "tie in" your debit card (I didn't have cash the last two times I went). I will NEVER buy alcohol or tobacco with anything other than cash. The tracking that stores and banks do in the background is insane. People fall into two camps here: they either don't care because they are saving a feew pennies or they care deeply. As one of the latter, I think it's just a matter of time before the tracking is so insidious you cannot escape it. Some stores actually track your phone, which is one reason I have disabled everything on my phone when out in public.
I'm not paranoid at all, but THEY are out to capitalize on people and the rich and those in control do want to control the masses. I have seen this coming since forever. Being in IT makes this more of a priority for me because I understand how it all works and where the tie-ins are. Now they want to track eyeballs in cars. Every store wants a "relationship" with you. Doctors' offices ask if there are firearms in your home. Employers want to monopolize your time even when off the clock. My last employer tried this. I told them when I'm off the clock, I'm unemployed and my time is my own. I refuse to be controlled and shepherded by those who want only to control me physically, emotionally, mentally, whatever.
Brave new world doesn't even begin to describe it. I fear for my young children and wonder just how dystopian it will become for them and will they have the presence of mind to understand it and fight back.
You have a horrible misconception.
The trees used for paper are called "softwood" and are replanted. Fact, the paper industry replants more than they use. The paper industry does not destroy forests.
You are whining about logging for lumber, not paper. Different trees.
Stop being stupid, those paper towel makers are helping.
You're essentially asking if a politician thought about the consequences of the legislation that they voted for. They barely get time to read what they're voting for, let alone think about it.
wtf is wrong with the water in california? there's no other explanation for the stupidity that gets thought there.
what's the cost of digitally storing and making available only to the purchaser all receipts for perpetuity ?
Go well
yet they still have a shithole state with sidewalks full of shit, criminal gangs running the cities, rampant illegal immigration, drug abuse, political entities on every level out of touch with their constituents, corruption, not to mention geographic instability. can't even clean up your own state and you're presuming to tell others how important your shithole state is to the welfare of the other states? hahahaha you deserve the stupidity thought up there.
Fact: This announcement is that they have printed it to be read, then at a later date, when everyone has had time to read it, it will be discussed and voted on.
no, we can't do this without suitable technology to replace paper receipts. An anonymous application to transfer data to and device no longer exists. Perhaps in the PalmOS & Nokia era of handhelds we could have beamed them over IRda. But currently devices lack the interfaces and protocols to do this.
Displaying a QR code would work, but the infrastructure required for vendors to store receipts isn't here in a scalable way.
Most paper in the US is made from trees grown on tree farms. Yes, trees are a crop, planted and raised by farmers, like any other crop. They just have a longer harvest cycle than seasonal crops.
http://www.ecology.com/2011/09...
Why do we want to put tree farmers out of business?
Please cry more. Your tears sustain me. Fun fact: Conservatard tears are 10 times saltier than the other leading brands.
Faggot no longer refers to gay people. There's a South Park episode from, like, 10 years ago explaining it to you with a Harley Davidson metaphor. You really should keep up with the times, you faggotty grandpa.
The reciept-less tellers will have a big e-paper display facing the customer which shows the complete reciept.
It includes a fingerprint certifying that it's signed by the shop's private key.
The customer uses his phone to take a picture of the reciept. Done.
If the customer does not have a camera, he pushes a button and gets a printout.
See... there is no email address involved. Completely anonymous.
This solution is visibly so simple that nobody will even think about it.
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
So store say they've sent you a digital receipt, then you find they haven't when you get home....
I was under the impression that a computer file fixed in a tangible medium (such as the SSD of your mail server) was "written". At least that's the case in copyright law. Moreover, a document whose hash is encrypted with the private key on your payment card's chip is digitally "signed". Is there case law on the statute of frauds to the contrary?