To the rubbish pile that the Internet is creating, alongside the road maps, newspapers and music CDs, add one more artifact of consumer life, the paper receipt.
Major retailers, including Whole Foods Market, Nordstrom, Gap Inc. (which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic), Anthropologie, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, have begun offering electronic versions of receipts, either e-mailed or uploaded to password-protected Web sites. And more and more customers, the retailers report, are opting for paperless.
“As consumers, we’re changing the way we shop,” said Jennifer Miles, who oversees retail systems at VeriFone, which makes checkout technology. “Customers are starting to want electronic receipts.”
Many people like keeping searchable records on a computer — e-receipts come in handy during tax season, make some returns a snap and are a tidy addition to the e-purchases already stored on countless hard drives. Others see the paper versions as an anachronism, wasteful of resources and as irrelevant as printed bank statements and mutual fund reports.
And face it, paper receipts can be annoyances, burrowing into the bottoms of purses, getting lost in glove compartments or fattening up wallets — only to be pulled out and puzzled over long after their usefulness has expired.
“I throw them out,” said Francesca Joseph, 29, who was shopping with Ms. Michel at the Old Navy store.
Retailers first considered e-receipts in the late 1990s, but the dot-com crash stopped most efforts, said Birame N. Sock, who runs an e-receipt company.
In 2005, Apple introduced electronic receipts at its stylish retail stores. More mainstream retailers found the checkout system difficult to replicate and, Ms. Miles said, worried that most shoppers were not quite ready for such a technological leap.
