At an Old Navy store in Manhattan the other day, Fabienne Michel made a routine purchase of khaki shorts. But she left the store without something equally routine: her receipt。
The sales clerk had sent it to Ms. Michel by e-mail. "It's easier," said Ms. Michel, "You can reprint it, save it, make folders in your e-mail."
Major retailers in America 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, "Customers are starting to want electronic receipts."
Many people like keeping searchable records on a computer — e-receipts come in handy during tax season. Others see the paper versions as an anachronism, wasteful of resources (an estimated 9.6 million trees are cut each year for receipts in the United States, according to a digital receipt company) 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。
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。
Now, though, the rush to imitate Apple’s success is in full force, and paperless receipts have become a rite of passage for retailers trying to integrate the digital experience into their brick and mortar stores。
据《》8月7日报道：几日前在美国曼哈顿的一个老海军(美国服装品牌)服装店里，法比安•像往常一样买了一件卡其色短裤，但和往常不一样的是，她离开商店时并没有索要付款收据。
那是因为店员给小姐发送了一个电子收据，“这个更简单”，说，“你可以打印出来，也可以在电子邮箱里建立文件夹把它保存下来。”
据悉，无论是通过电子邮箱还是上传到有密保的网站，美国的大多数零售商已经开始提供收款收据的电子版本，而据零售商反映，越来越多的消费者都愿意选择无纸收据。
“作为顾客，我们也在改变我们的消费方式，”詹尼佛•迈尔斯说，“我们已经开始接受电子收据。”
很多人喜欢在电脑上保存一份可查询的记录，这样一来电子收据在交税的时候迟早能用上。还有的人认为纸质收据有些落伍，是对资源的浪费，就如同打印出来的银行对账单和共同基金报表一样没用。(据一家电子收据公司估计，全美国每年要砍伐960万棵树制造用作收据的纸张)
比起电子收据，纸质收据很麻烦，他们不是老藏在钱包底部、丢在杂物箱内就是涨的钱夹子鼓鼓囊囊，好不容易找出来却郁闷地收据发现已经过期。
据一家电子票据公司的老板毕瑞姆-索克介绍，零售商们首度考虑引入电子收据是在20世纪90年代，但网络经济的崩盘让一切努力付诸东流。
2005年，苹果公司在他们时尚的零售店里推出了电子收据，但当时其他主流零售商认为要模仿这个结账系统很难。
但是现在，人们却在极力模仿苹果公司的成功，而无纸化收据也已成为零售商试图为其实体店融入数字体验的一个渠道。