[m463]

There's a lot underneath your comment.

For instance, when you buy something and get a receipt - it is not for you the customer. It is to keep the employee honest. If there is no receipt, it might not have been entered into the cash register.

Now with electronic payments a lot of this risk has gone away and receipts are becoming optional.

Also, I remember some people telling me in their stores, the last digits of a product were secret code. Like ending in .23 (i made this up) meant the product was being discontinued and only stock on hand was available. There were other codes for other things.

[201984]

Costco does that. If a price ends in .97, it's been discontinued. If a price ends in something that isn't a 9, usually means it's on sale. You can look up the exact details.

[em-bee]

in china, businesses are required to use government managed software that will automatically handle taxes and print on government issued receipt paper. for a while the receipt paper included a scratch field where consumers could win something in order to motivate them to demand a receipt. at least once we won more than we spent. some 2digit amount in dollars.

[gaius_baltar]

In Brazil we have an entire PKI based receipt system, every single purchase generates a full listing record straight to a government database sent in realtime (or later, in "contingency mode" as called, if having network issues). A lot sales also include the customer's personal tax-id... no privacy for any purchase at all. It's required for everything, even a liter of milk from the corner bakery.

This is also the electronic version of an older, paper based system, called Nota Fiscal (lit Fiscal Receipt) ... legally, every single item carried around the country must have one. Of course this was/is a major enabler for selective police action against "undesirable people" moving trivial stuff from a home to another, etc.

[miki123211]

The government-managed (or at least government-certified) software is not just China, but also large parts of the EU.

[chrisjj]

> government-managed (or at least government-certified

Huge difference.

[em-bee]

to be fair, i don't know how much different the chinese management is from a european certification system.

we were told to use specific software. and for sure that software is created by some company that may or may not be government owned. i don't know if there was any choice since, as is typical with foreigners, someone will just tell me their recommendation and not try to explain the differences between choices, unless they matter. ie: just go with the default.

i did have the impression that different regions use different software at least.

i expect that potentially in european countries there are multiple competitors for the same software, but i don't know that either.

so for all i know the amount of choice and control in china could be the same as some countries in europe.

[chrisjj]

I think the point is less ownership and more remote access.

[em-bee]

ah, well, what i had in mind by the term government managed had nothing to do with remote access. i was only thinking about the ownership of the software, not how it works.

[dgfitz]

Price endings were absolutely a thing at circuit city back in the early 2000s. .98 .97 and.95 all had meanings. I can’t remember how they mapped but it was something similar to “vendor discontinued, CC discontinued” and something else maybe ha

[samatman]

Customer facing reasons for receipts in no particular order:

- Expensing purchases to their employer or self-owned business

- Record of sale to be used in returns

- Reconciliation of spending with cheques or credit card statements

- Budgeting and accounting generally

[m463]

My suspicion is that most business owners don't care about ANY of that.

even returns - it might actually be enough friction that returns would go down.

for example, why would a donut shop give receipts?

I have a friend who recently opened a bar. He did cash in the beginning, but finally got the electronic payments for the bar installed. He immediately caught a bartender stealing.

He noticed that at the start, the bartender got a lot of tips. But when the electronic payment system went in, the tips were not anywhere near as much. He reviewed everything and found the people in the bar do not tip well.

What the bartender was doing was selling drinks and putting many of the cash sales entirely in the tip jar. When the electronic payment system went in, he wasn't handling as much cash and the lower tipping rate showed up.

[samatman]

> for example, why would a donut shop give receipts?

Because of members of a social club, whose turn it is to buy the donuts, wants to have it to give to the treasurer so that it can count against their monthly dues.

The more general answer is because, at this point in time, a receipt is universally expected. I'm not denying that businesses have internal reasons to hand them out, and keep a copy, I'm saying that customer demand played a role at the time this convention was established. They've become increasingly useless on the customer side, except for business expenses, where they remain vital.

[iceburgcrm]

It might be because an electronic payment system can accept exact tender and / or the options to tip defaults to lower payment options / easier to hide a small tip to your friends

With cash few have exact change and the table can see what you give. This leads to rarely asking for change back and putting higher amounts as it ups your social ranking.

This effect is easier to see in a bar.

Often you need to keep track of dollar per unit sold as some staff will overpour

[m463]

Although employees should get the benefit of the doubt (and he did in the beginning), the camera footage eliminated all doubt.