@headcase: The money you use to purchase a product belongs to the retailer as soon as the transaction is completed. Whether they use it on receipts, employee pay, paint for the bathroom, or profit is their concern, not yours (unless you are a stock-holder).

Looking* over your question again. Also The costs are passed on to* the buyer. Sorry all.

When a corporation incurs a cost, the costs are passed on the buyer.

Thus, we pay for the receipt paper.

Frankly I couldn't understand it very well.

Nothing objectively wrong with that, but it's annoying. Imagine this extreme: some store had this row of blue buttons. If you can stand at a blue button, doing nothing but holding it for, say 30 mins, you get half off some product. If you have enough money, you'll say "screw it", and pay full price. It you have enough time on your hands and not a lot of money, you'll hold the button, and save some money.

So, great. The company got the maximum money they could out of everyone (rich guy pays full price, poorer guy pays as much as he'd be willing to), and everyone got their product. But someone totally dicked away 30 minutes that could have been better spent doing anything.

I'm not saying coupons take 30 minutes to clip, but that's my attempt to explain why I don't like them. Can't we just tax the rich more and call it a day?

Nothing against the OP. If they're going to be around anyway, I have nothing against anyone using them. Might as well take advantage.

But that's why I hate coupons, and thus why I hate lengthening receipts for them.

@headcase: You think you have some kind of claim over the money you hand over to a retailer once you walk out of the store with your purchase?

It's just not a lot of money. At least not until you look at it collectively.

In any case, it's very annoying.

Oh, yes, I used to work for Kmart (who owns Sears) and about 90% of the receipts were ads. I recently bought a mountain dew there and found that they still haven't changed their ways. Maybe if they cut down on the paper in the receipts, they'd cut down on their monetary losses. Trust me, no one reads the ads on the receipts.

@amuro98:

I do that with Prepaid postage cards stuffed into every magazin ... I figure @ least that way they have to PAY to receive their garbage as well as other " special offers " I have gotten from other junque mail :-)

I worked at CVS for three years, and that's nothing. Receipts that printed out printed out at least once every couple of shifts, and I recall seeing ones that were twice that, seriously. I liked to impress the customer by raising the receipts by their tops as they spit out of the machine, to show the customer how ¨lucky¨they were.

CVS prints out tons of (mostly irrelevant) coupons and a few (decent, but rarely good enough to make up for their high prices) ExtraBuck coupons, but generally manages to do more things wrong than right.

There's a reason (well, tons of them, actually) that I shop at Walgreen's now, and it's not because I longer work I CVS, though that's true.

Oh, and FYI: any time there are 3 or more customers in line, company policy is to page another cashier, even if a supervisor or manager has to ring people up. Try reminding the cashier of that, loudly, the next time you're stuck in a 15 minute line.

@Preyfar: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

The X Prize? They'll shoot me into space so I can win ten million dollars if I fill out their questionnaire?

I gotta get to a CVS!

I hate CVS for this reason. It's ridiculous. Why can't we have receipts scanned to our cards or something?

This is correct -- I have to have my own CVS card to use them. I do use the extra care bucks, but I remember getting $10 and more sometimes. Now: the proverbial peanuts.

All these long receipts for known customers who shop at CSV or the other stores mentioned are probably saving the total amount of paper wasted. Print ads targeted to a smaller subset of consumers after a purchase vs. the mass mailings and inserts that go to all "potential" consumers in a given area seem to be a better use of technology and materials.

And, for the people complaining about wasting the earth's resources, how did you get to the store to buy one tube of toothpaste or one pack of gum or one grommet? Did you walk, drive your SUV, bike, take the bus?? How many other stops did you make to buy a small item at many stores?

A nice idea, but it's not as though the clerks have any control over the inane receipt printers. Even complaining to the store's manager would be misdirected.

Instead, I collect the receipts and mail them to corporate. It probably won't do anything either, but at least I feel I'm attempting to direct my complaints to someone (or thing) that could make a difference.

Lesson for the day: Don't comment when you are more than half asleep. Otherwise you end up making an ass out of myself.

@OmniZero:

That was definitely the dumbest comment I've seen in a while.

It just amazed me that I could get a receipt that I could use as gift wrap for the thing I purchased. I found it such a waste to give me a huge receipt for such a tiny purchase.

And I'm not talking about wrapping paper like it just barely covered it. This was enough to make it professional looking with all the folds and everything like that. I could've added a bow.

Beautiful Aussie Shepherd in that picture!

@winstonthorne: Wouldn't be unussual if they deal with a lot of business clients. Generally works out to be one copy goes to the customer, one copy if for the store, one copy goes to auditing and one copy goes to finance. The colours and number of copies may vary store to store, but it's not unusal in places that sell expensive items or large volume numbers to single clients.

Why can't CVS just link the receipt to the card and do away with the paper altogether?

The look in that dog's eyes says he knows he's being used for some silly internet purpose

Perhaps we could " toilet paper " our local CVS's with receipt paper ...

Westley: Reicepts Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.

My local CVS has a kiosk in the store where I can scan my card and have coupons print instantly. Would be nice if the POS system could just register that I have these coupons coming and store them in their coupon system so I can print them from the kiosk when I need them. I do get coupons I would use on my receipt. Unfortunately, I don't carry the receipts around with me, so I never have the coupons with me when I'm in CVS.
Hmmm .... Maybe that's what they're counting on ... good PR - we give you coupons for your next purchase, good finances - you never redeem them ...

Free toilet paper!

Perhaps an email reminder with the details of the coupons and their expiry dates along the way..?

I'd love that, since most of the junk barfed up by the register aren't coupons we can use anyway.

Or.. free dog with every coupon.

I have a Blue Merle

our Home Hardware runs the same system. the customer gets the pink copy, the office gets the gold.

not from 1972 btw. Dot Matrix printers and multi part stationary are still the most efficient system for a lot of stores where multiple copies are needed.. you can print 1 time instead of 3, 4 or more times with an inkjet or a laser.

Usually I don't find wasting paper to be a big deal - after all, its made from pine trees, which are a cash crop - but given the ammount of chemical crap that reciept paper is made with you think they could at least reduce it to one disclaimer for all their reciept coupons.

Folks, if you don't want a long receipt at CVS, don't use your Extra Care card. However, you then give up all rights to complain that you're not getting any coupons or the sale price. I'm willing to put up with it, but if you're not, that's your decision. Yes, I'm male, but my wife might want the cosmetic or feminine hygiene coupons. That's the thing about coupons...hopefully they're targeted well, but often are hit or miss.

Too long receipts. The horror! They purchase the paper for the reciepts, they pay for the ink, they pay for the register to print it.

Take the receipt home and throw it in the recycling bin. It may have been composed of recycled paper to begin with.

Suprised CVS has not caught more flack from "green" groups over this horrid waste of paper. Not to mention it's thermal paper that is coated with chemicals.

I am a male and get tons of coupons on my CVS receipts for makeup and other products I would never buy in 100 years.

I am glad this is posted on the Consumerist again. CVS needs pressure to do something about this. They can easily make each coupon smaller as a start and then take other steps to make the receipts shorter.

I simply tear off the actual receipt & hand the add on junk back to the cashier asking them nicely to dispose of their garbage for me ...

Works every time & you don't have to be rude about it ... believe me, the cashiers where I shop are generally embarrassed by those impossibly long "receipts" ...

The receipt I got could have been used as wrapping paper for the pack of gum. It was that long.

You have to hand it to them though, those extra care bucks do come in handy. Especially if you're a girl, I will use them to buy silly overpriced cosmetics... their just like cash at CVS. Save a little bit of tree or save a few dollars... what would you do in a pinch?

(And this is comming from a tree-hugging, vegetarian type... girls still got to pay the bills somehow)

But yeah, I've gone to CVS and Rite Aid and gotten impossibly long receipts. Buy product X, receipt prints out with info, two coupons, instructions on how to join their "savings" program, instructions on filling out their questionnaire to possibly win X prize, their address and some other useless information. It's incredible.

No matter what you buy, Sears gives you pages and pages of receipt. I thought they had done my taxes by mistake form all the paperwork they gave me after I bought a screwdriver.