Oct 092009
 

My local supermarket which is part of one of those immense corporate empires, has started doing something immensely stupid. Not exceptionally inconvenient, but just one of those irritating examples where some bright spark has come up with an idea that has not been fully thought through (or even tested properly).

What they have started doing is printing in addition to your standard till receipt, a little note about some loyalty scheme. Which means you have two silly little bits of paper to collect.

Which is hardly very environmentally friendly and probably costs them a surprising amount. Just a small amount of stupidity really – a simple poster would be just as effective and far less wasteful.

However when you get to automated tills, the receipts are dispensed automatically. The printer has a mechanism by which it drops any uncollected receipts on the floor before it prints your receipt. Except when two receipts are printed you have a window of opportunity of about a second (whilst you are fumbling with bags, and change) to collect the first. And guess which one is your real receipt ?

Yes, it is the first one printed. So everyone ends up with a note about a loyalty scheme rather than their real receipt. Kind of useful if you need to return something, or prove that you’ve just bought something to the security guard on the door!

The conspiracy theorists would come up with something about collecting the receipts to discover your shopping patterns or something. Nothing of the sort. This is just corporate stupidity!