Apparently merchants are no longer required to give customers a paper receipt. A cafe with a no-cash sign also had no menus. Normally I would move along but they had something unique that I wanted to try.
They had wifi without a captive portal, so I was able to get online. But the menu would not render in my browser (“Privacy Browser”). No idea what the malfunction was but I just got a black screen when visiting the menu. So the staff had a phone they let me use (which is important because who’s to say that all customers even carry a smartphone).
I was able to place an order. I’m not sure how they normally work out which order goes to what table because there was no step of identifying my table in the UI. Perhaps they guess based on timing of my entrance. After placing an order, I tapped a pay afterwards option. And I was able to pay at the register. But the register had no printer. No way of producing receipts.
me: I would like a receipt please
staff: that will be in gmail¹
me: what email? I was never asked for an email address.
Staff discusses among themselves how to add an email address to an order that came from one of their phones. Turns out to be impossible (at least as far as they knew).
¹ yes they really said “gmail” not email, which made me realise /their/ address is gmail, and thus the receipt would be transmitted with Google in the loop.
So even if they could work out a way to associate my email address to the order, the receipt would come from Google. Of course the first problem is assuming customers even have an email account and willingness to share it. The assumption that breaks down in my case is the assumption that I am okay with Google tracking my offline commerce.
GAFAM is investing fortunes in buying offline sales data and I oppose willfully feeding these tech giants. I will not give an email address to a gmail user.
I was denied a receipt because of a competency issue, but had competency not been an issue I would have still been denied a receipt because of my ethical stance. Is this really legal?² What if it had been a business meal subject to a tax deduction? The taxman wants receipts.
After I left, it later occurred to me to ask for a hand-written receipt on a napkin or whatever they can come up with. I will ask for that next time.
² My question of legality is strictly in terms of denying customers a printed receipt. I’m sure it’s illegal from a GDPR standpoint (data minimisation – my email address is not necessary for performance of the contract).
These things are small experimentation gardens, big corporations are looking at these setups with interest:
It reduces overhead costs on their end, no printer costs, no paper costs, less personnel-hours needed since the customer does all the work by sorting out their own menu, adding their own email adress, and inserting their order in the system.
It might lead to the next step in ordering fast food (on site), customers ordering on their own phone (email login required) and using qr codes to transfer them to the local restaurant’s ordering kiosk…
Ofcourse the savings will only be on the corporate side and the actual food will just keep getting more expensive for the customers.
Now for the receipt thing, I don’t know the exact rules, but a written receipt must be provided if the customer asks for one. A “pin” receipt, ie. validation of payment is not a legal item to be used for tax deduction because it does not list what you bought nor the amount of tax, not sure if both percentage and the amount must be present.
It sounds a bit like you went inside a place that was a startup by some “students” with bright new ideas that were not fully thought out yet. They easily go for the bottom line in costs saving by dropping staff costs as much as they can, probably corrects itself over some time.
Indeed that was my thought as well. The problem is we don’t have enough consumers experimenting with privacy and/or an analog life. If just a few percent of the population would insist on cash payment, refuse to feed the tech giants, and resist designed obsolescence by using old smartphones (AOS 4-), and run only FOSS, then there could be some headway into ensuring these digital experiments that kill off lifestyle freedom of choice while leaving some people in the dust would rightfully fail. It would be interesting if a consumer union would recruit right-to-be-analog proponents to target merchants among these experimental digital dystopias.
In the parts of the world I’ve been, an itemised receipt and card receipt are both given or they are combined into one. In my travels through Netherlands I often only receive one form of receipt or the other and sometimes I have to request it.
ATMs are mandated by international treaties to print receipts, yet I’ve noticed some that are perpetually out of paper.
The cashless direction is forcing a “paper trail” on us whether we want it or not, but then at the same time the receipt problems seem to deny us the benefits of the paper trail (to be able to claim tax deductions and make warranty claims). For ultimate control I generally want to pay in cash (for data control) and receive an itemised receipt (for tax/warranty claims) which should be on paper (for more data control).