Why on earth are shops still demanding a receipt when we want to return something?
A friend of mine told me the other day about an incident that she found extremely irritating — and rightly so: a store where she is a frequent customer, with an account and loyalty card, asked her for the receipt of an item she wanted to return.
The whole thing sound so clumsy as to be offensive: we all know that shops collect every bit of data they can about us: assigning us a socio-demographic profile, address, shopping habits, and of course, everything we’ve ever bought… so why on earth would a store need a receipt, the kind that fades after a while? What do they think? That their customers are trying to palm them off with goods bought elsewhere? Come on: it’s really easy to check the records of previous transactions to confirm when the item was bought.
It’s as simple as that. Why needlessly force customers to keep receipts? The practice sounds like companies want to eat their cake and have it: they can send us promotions, offers and all kinds of marketing… but when we need something from them, we’re made to prove that we’re not cheats.
The same question has already been raised with regard to the personal data held by our governments and state institutions: why force us to store all kinds of data and documents, when that data is already on file? Why do…
