Mercadona and the rest of the supermarkets spend tons of paper on receipts that no one reads. Now they want to change it

You go to the supermarket, you buy a couple of things (just enough for dinner), you go to the checkout, they give you the ticket, you put it in your pocket and you leave with the bag in the direction of the parking lot. Pure routine. Our daily bread. If the employer’s retail achieves its objective, there is one element of that scene, however, that will change radically.

Which? That ticket that you will end up throwing away without even reading it.

What has happened? Every year supermarkets print millions and millions of strips of paper in which in many cases only a handful of articles appear, so they end up in the garbage can without anyone having even looked at them.

It is a waste, a waste of resources. For chains like Dia, Lidl or Mercadona, but also for the environment. So Asedas (Spanish Association of Distributors, Self-Service and Supermarkets) has had an idea: they want us to start printing receipts only when the customer requests it.

What do they want? The news I advanced it on thursday theEconomist. Asedas has proposed to the Government that it slightly tweak the regulations that regulate tickets so that they are no longer printed systematically. That does not mean that they are no longer issued or that the customer no longer has a receipt that clarifies what they have purchased and how much they have been charged. The change would focus on support.

The idea, clarifies Ignacio García, head of Asedas, is “that the ticket continues to be generated electronically for control purposes, but that it is printed on paper at the consumer’s request.” That is, the user can request the physical or digital ticket. Right now, remember theEconomistthe regulations provide that supers deliver the receipt in two ways: either in paper or digital format. What’s happening? Since not all clients are in favor of handing over their data (including email) to the chains, in the end they have no choice but to print it.

Not only that. The employer’s data They show that many of the times we go to the supermarket we buy only a handful of items, so the receipts show small transactions, for low amounts that we do not even review. Result: those papers end up in the trash as they are printed. It is not even strange for the customer to reject them when the cashier offers them to them.

Is it that serious? “Our companies have been confirming for years that, in about a third of operations, the ticket is abandoned at the checkout line,” confirm Garcia. It is not surprising if we take into account the data on the shopping basket managed by Asedas. According to their estimates, 30% of the operations registered in supermarkets respond to almost urgent visits, during which we take home at most four products and spend less than 10 euros.

In 60% of cases, purchases involve between five and 25 products with average tickets of between 10 and 50 euros. Only the remaining 10% actually respond to large purchases. In practice, the fact that all operations end up reflected in a receipt means that the supers generate about 5 billion tickets that require the use of almost 4,500 tons of paper and a million-dollar expense.

Is it important? Beyond the millions of receipts that are printed each year and the cost that this entails in tons of paper and euros, Asedas’ proposal is interesting for at least two reasons. To start with who throws it. Asedas presume to be “the first food distribution business organization in Spain” and cover 19,200 retail stores and 495 wholesalers. Between your partners Companies such as Mercadona, Lidl, Aldi or Dia appear.

Another key is that its idea is in line with what is already done in other European countries. For example, in 2023 France said goodbye to the generation of tickets by default precisely because of the amount of paper it consumed. That doesn’t mean they no longer exist, but they must be requested. In the Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden there have also been changes related to the generation of receipts. In Spain itself, some large chains they take time moving towards the digital ticket.

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