bheine.net

Ben Heine: web communications and digital operations in Birmingham, AL

The Long Receipt: CVS, Kitchen Tickets, and Why Tickr Prints on Paper

In 2011 I was on the team at CVS that kept adding things to the checkout receipt. It was a strange, fast time to be near it, and I have thought about it more than I expected to in the years since. It turns out to be the best explanation I have for why I now print my mornings on a strip of paper.

The receipt that kept growing

If you have shopped at CVS you know the result. Buy a pack of gum and the register keeps going: coupons, reward offers, a survey invitation, more coupons. CVS has said the length was intended to show the value of being an ExtraCare member. The offers are personalized from your shopping history and location, so the more you shop, the more there is to print. In one 2018 account, a receipt ran 10.5 inches without the loyalty card scanned and more than four feet with it.

Side Effects Side Effects Include GIF

The Office, on the receipt as a unit of measurement. GIF via Tenor.

How it most likely went

I can't give you meeting minutes, and I wouldn't trust anyone who claimed to remember which meeting did what. What I can give you is the shape of it, reconstructed as honestly as I can. It was not a plan. Nobody decided the receipt should be four feet long. It got there one reasonable step at a time.

  • The receipt was free real estate. [tim_free_real_estate.gif] Every customer gets one, at the exact moment they have just spent money, and the paper costs almost nothing per inch. No other channel is that reliable or that cheap.
  • The loyalty card made it personal. Once the register knew who you were, the receipt could carry offers chosen for you. That made it more valuable than a generic printout, and more worth fighting over.
  • Each addition won its own test. One more coupon meant more redemptions. A survey invitation meant more responses. Every proposal came with a number that went up. None of the tests measured what the extra inches cost.
  • The costs belonged to nobody. Paper, cashier time, the customer’s patience, the chance that someone photographs the receipt and posts it: none of that sat on the dashboard of the team asking for the next inch. Whoever owned redemption rate wanted more room. Nobody owned the receipt.
  • Adding is easy and removing is hard. Once a team has a slot on the receipt, taking it away means explaining a drop in a number you are responsible for. So slots accumulate.
  • Length is invisible in a spreadsheet. It only shows up when someone holds the whole thing in their hand, unrolled. I suspect that for a while the people deciding what went on it rarely saw it that way.

That is a local optimum. Every step made sense, and the total made a receipt people mocked. I would bet most large systems that feel out of control got that way like this, not through a bad decision but through many good ones that nobody added up.

What CVS said later

The public record is more candid than I expected. In 2013 CVS announced it was cutting receipt length by about 25% after complaints, and a spokesperson said redemption rates then reached all-time highs. If that is right, a quarter of the paper had not been earning its place. In May 2016 the company’s president, Helena Foulkes, announced digital receipts on Jimmy Kimmel Live, saying the company knew “our customers were very concerned about the length of our receipts.” CVS has since said digital receipts saved more than 3 billion inches of paper.

Thousands of tickets

Before any of that, in the 2000s, I worked as a cook in restaurants, and I pulled many thousands of order tickets. I want to describe them, because they are the opposite of a CVS receipt, and I think they shaped me more.

In most kitchens the first sound of a rush is the printer. A ticket comes out, gets torn off, read top to bottom, and hung on the rail. You cook what it says. You pull it when the food goes out. There is no login, no refresh, and nothing to configure. The rail is the queue, and you can read the state of the whole restaurant by looking up.

A kitchen printer is a close cousin of the thermal receipt printer: the same kind of roll, the same narrow strip, the same job. The difference is how it prints. Kitchens use impact printers with an ink ribbon, because thermal paper darkens with heat and a kitchen is nothing but heat. They are loud, which is part of the memory. The printer on my counter now is the quiet, inkless relative of the one I stood next to for years.

What I value about a ticket now is what it does not do. It does not change after it prints. It does not need the network, so the tickets already on the rail keep saying what is owed even when the system hiccups. It is short because a long ticket costs a cook time during the worst minute of the night, so nobody adds a line unless someone will act on it. Every line on it is an instruction, and the person who pays for a bad line is the person reading it.

At CVS the person who paid for the extra inch was never the person who added it. In a kitchen they are the same person. I have stood on both sides of that.

Why Tickr prints on paper

So when I built Tickr, a screen was the obvious choice and the wrong one. What I wanted was the ticket: a physical thing with a few properties I trust.

  • It does not change. The strip says the same thing at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. No update, no redesign, no different answer on a second look.
  • It has an end. Tickr measures the page and prints exactly as much paper as there is content. A morning briefing you can finish is a different thing from a feed.
  • It needs nothing. No battery, no login, no notification. It cannot interrupt you. It is just there, on the fridge, until you tear it up.
  • It closes the loop. Pull the ticket when the food goes out. Tear the strip when the day starts. Either way, a physical act says it is done.

And on Tickr I am the only person who owns the receipt. I pay for every line, so I get to do what the CVS team never quite managed: make each section earn its inches. The layout editor is a rail I can reorder, and Tickr’s default strip is 47 mm wide, which is a useful editor by itself.

Thermal paper is cheap, and needs no ink

The other thing I took from restaurants and CVS is how ordinary this hardware is. Direct thermal printing uses a print head with tiny heating elements and paper with a coating that turns black where it is heated. There is no ink, no ribbon and no toner. Nothing dries out between uses, and nothing needs replacing.

The paper is cheap too. For scale, one retailer lists standard 80 mm rolls, 273 feet long, at $69.99 for a case of 50, which is about $1.40 a roll. At a foot of paper per morning, that roll lasts most of a year, so the paper costs roughly a couple of dollars a year. That is my arithmetic from one price listing, so treat it as a ballpark. The printer is the bigger expense, and it was not very big: I paid $45 for mine on eBay. New Epson receipt printers in the TM-T20 line that I found are listed from about $200 to about $360 depending on the interface, so used is where these are a bargain. Either way it is a one-time cost, and there is nothing to refill, unlike a home inkjet.

A few honest caveats, because I learned at CVS that free paper is not free:

  • The coating matters. Most thermal paper is coated with BPA or BPS. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency advises against recycling it, and says not to hand receipts to infants or toddlers. Tickr prints a page for a small child, so if you build something like this, buy phenol-free or BPA/BPS-free paper.
  • It fades. Heat, light and friction darken or bleach thermal print. That suits a briefing for one day and rules it out as an archive.
  • It is still paper. A foot a day is far less than a four-foot receipt, but I would rather notice it than ignore it. That is the lesson.

A printer, a roll of paper and a ticket rail each do one thing and show their work. I did not expect a drugstore receipt to be part of why I like that.

Sources