[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.