Thankfully, more and more retailers have enabled the capability to email receipts to customers instead of having to deal with a (gasp!) paper receipt:
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.
I have to say that this is one of the most wonderful advances to come to “in store” purchases in, well, forever. Not surprisingly, whenever I make a purchase at an Apple store, having them email me the receipt is one less thing to worry about. I know its in my Inbox and with Gmail’s filters, I can set it up to “automagically” file itself under my “Apple > Receipts” tag/folder. Getting rid of clutter is such a wonderful thing.