Receipt Forest
Part of being human means rationalising things that are otherwise absurd. If we didn't, we would surely go crazy.
One thing that I've never been able to rationalise, because it's actually insane, is the receipt printers at New World, one of New Zealand's national supermarkets.
When you make a purchase using one of the self-checkout machines, it will ask you after paying whether you would like a receipt.
Please ignore the junk I purchased. The 2025 Royal Rumble was on and that shit was 4 hours long so I needed a snack. Also yes, inflation is crazy.
The problem here is that it doesn't matter whether you press "Yes" or "No", you'll still get a receipt.
It's like all the worst elements of consent fatigue with none of the benefits!
Despite this screen, I always press "No" because without that, the machine will just sit there.
Usually either the next person after you presses "No", incurring the wait of having the machine spit out a receipt or a cashier comes over to press it.
The real horror is that next to each of these machines are plastic tubs for customers to discard their unwanted receipts into.
This is actually an evolution in the process, believe it or not.
Previously you just had to take the receipts with you, or try to walk away while feigning ignorance fast enough that the next person incurs the cost.
You also can't see from the photo but for this city metro store, there are about 10 self-checkouts, each with their own plastic tubs.
Not all of them are in use all at once, but during peak time they're all full.
All of this could be avoided if someone would just fix the fucking consent window to not print a receipt when "No" is pressed.
I get dark patterns for data collection but there's zero gain here for the stores either. They end up eating the cost in terms of ink and receipt paper. We're not even going to start on the potential effects of BPA which is probably unquantifiable in the long run.
To put it into perspective, I thought it'd be fun to do some math.
At the time of writing, New World has "more than 140 stores" so we'll say 140 stores to be generous.
We'll also be extremely generous and say that the average store only has 1 self-checkout.
I should mention I don't know for a fact that every New World store has this issue but the ones I've been to in recent memory have all had this issue.
I've never seen it fixed in any store either.
The fact that tubs exist at multiple stores, despite New World being a franchisee model, would suggest that someone up the chain made a decision to distribute tubs instead of, you know, doing the sane thing.
Many will have multiple and many probably have zero so hopefully this roughly shakes out.
Let's assume that we have a throughput of 1 customer a minute which I think is also very generous.
After clicking around about 10 stores, I think 7am - 9pm is a reasonable set of opening hours as well.
We'll assume 1 receipt per minute for 14 hours which gives us 840 receipts per day.
That's 117,600 receipts a day for 140 stores and 42,924,000 receipts per year across all 140 stores.
Again, this is presumably pretty generous.
According to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, that's roughly 1,288 trees worth of receipt paper.
It would also take about 485,000 litres of water to produce all that paper, or the daily water needs for about 120,000 people if we give them a generous 4 litres each.1
I wouldn't call myself an environmentalist by any stretch but damn, just fix the fucking button already!
Footnotes
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The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine puts the Adequate Intake level for total water intake at 3.7L and 2.7L for young men and women respectively. Some people surely need more and some people will get by with less. ↩