Always Keep The Receipt
A reminder for me, but also for you.
Every time I go out to eat with my mother, when the credit card slip arrives, she signs the part for the restaurant and then scribbles an indecipherable line of symbols on the customer receipt and tucks it into her wallet, already bulging with receipts, coupons and various store credit cards and god knows what else.
She’s been doing this my entire life and I’ve never thought to ask. I finally figured out that she’s making a note of how much she ended up paying — the tip, and then signing it, and then saving it, but the reasons why are beyond my ken. I have not seen her balance a checkbook in years; her work doesn’t require her to expense meals. She’s keeping the receipt, just in case — of what, I don’t know. Like many of the things she does that confound me, I have learned not to question them. To admit to her that I’ve managed to pluck a lesson from the soup of lessons she’s tried to teach me over the years would give her too much glee.
But, alas, I have. Always keep the receipt. Just do it. Keep it. Stuff it in your pocket. Keep it, because you honestly never know.
Receipts are essentially trash, meant to be crumpled up in the bottom of the bag and thrown away immediately after your purchase. This has been my habit anyway, and more often that not, it bites me in the ass. Receipts remind me of the money I’ve spent and kick the old guilt engine into overdrive, but they’re also extremely helpful if the thing that I’ve bought is actually wrong and needs to be returned.
Maybe I don’t keep the receipts because returning is my personal nightmare. Receipts are clutter, accumulating in my wallet or at the bottom of various bags. I blot my lipstick on receipts and wrap chewed wads of gum with them, only to find myself scrambling two weeks later when I realize the router I bought is the wrong router indeed, and must be shuffled back to the store. Yes, you can return stuff without a receipt, but having one surely mitigates that particular hell.
The only benefit I’ve found to keeping these things, aside from being able to return things without bursting into tears in front of an H&M employee, is the thrill I get from seeing the money I saved at the grocery store by using my loyalty card or the gajillions of dollars I saved by buying a crapload of tee shirts from the sale section at Old Navy. That’s nice, I guess. That’s worth it.
