Here's your receipt!

When I was a kid, my hometown here in eastern Ohio was bustling with all sorts of mom-and-pop stores. We also had a Woolworth, Sears, K-Mart, J. C. Penney and Hills.

These days, there’s still an independently owned hardware store, an independently owned shoe store, a good handful of non-chain restaurants, and a couple of florists and gift stores.

We have a ginormous four-story antiques mall that started life as a music store — launched by my first cousin three times removed composer Will Thompson, he of "Softly and Tenderly" fame — some smaller antiques and thrift stores and so on. We have three big grocery stores and several smaller food purveyors. East Liverpolitans are doing OK in terms of actual stores you can walk into and get what you need, and most of us also buy stuff online.

Just in the last coupla months, I noticed in my online shopping that post-transaction, it’s now common to be subjected to further requests. You have provided your payment information and your mailing address. You’re finished!

But are you finished? (You are not!) Like me, if you’re buying things online, you have been badgered after the transaction to sign up for a new credit card, donate to an animal shelter, buy a membership in a fitness club and/or throw your hat in the ring for a chance to win a cruise to someplace you have no interest in visiting. All that’s required is agreeing to share your email address!

I say a firm NOPE to each item. This is accomplished by ticking a little box labeled DECLINE OFFER. It should be labeled FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, LEAVE ME ALONE, but no: this is phrased delicately so as to encourage you to feel as though you’re turning down something delightful, like a fancy dessert.

What is in fact happening is that if you do not DECLINE OFFER, you are threatened with lifetime enmeshment with that particular retailer, as well as being handed off to other entities that are hankering to get their corporate talons into you via your email address and/or cell number. They want you to sign up, sign on and sign your information away so that they can “stay in touch” til kingdom come.

I hate the fact that money has so profoundly poisoned politics, but I did make an online donation to Barack Obama’s second campaign in 2012. Nothing came of it in terms of follow-up texts and emails, but remember: that was the Paleolithic era of online political donations. I then donated online to Kamala Harris’s campaign a mere dozen years later and since then, I have been subjected to a dozen or so weekly political texts and emails.

That’s online. In real life, there are the paper receipts, Lord have mercy. When and why did we start being handed receipts for even the most minimal of transactions? Comedian Mitch Hedberg rolled his eyes about this way back in 1999:

“I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut. I don’t need a receipt for the doughnut. I’ll just give you the money, and you give me the doughnut. End of transaction. We don’t need to bring ink and paper into this. I just can’t imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut.”

He followed this up by noting that if someone hands you a flyer on the street, “It’s like they’re saying, here, you throw this away.”

We’re all familiar with the in-store receipts. You buy shampoo, gum and a pack of lightbulbs and you are then presented with a Dead Sea scroll as long as your forearm. As if that weren’t bad enough — and don’t you think it oughta be? — there’s a fairly substantial amount of evidence that the thermal ink used on these receipts is super-bad for you, and can be absorbed through your skin in as few as ten seconds of handling the receipt. Unless I’m mailing an item or buying something over a couple hundred dollars, I tell them I don’t need a receipt and just note the purchase in my phone.

The first time I recall being tuned in to receipts of any kind was about 35 years ago. It was right around this time that paper receipts started enumerating the specific items you’d bought, rather than just the prices of each item.

I was working at Carnegie Mellon University’s business school, and my boss Davina had hired this guy Scott from Wisconsin to be . . . I forget what. Director of Annual Giving? Director of Corporate Relations? Something. I can’t remember because it was so long ago, and he only worked there for a few months.

That was fine, because not one of us liked this guy. Davina was savvy, hyper-smart, very on the ball (and still is). I chalk the Scott-hiring up to a rare misstep on her part. He looked good on paper, but was really not good in real life. The rest of us, to a person, thought Scott was smarmy and fake and just plain strange. A little off. Out of step in some indefinable way.

Here’s an example: no matter what the topic of conversation, Scott started probably a third of his sentences with, “And again . . . “ This habit served two general purposes: a) to intensify his annoyingness (a word I just invented), and b) to somehow suggest that he alone had originally come up with the idea whenever good ideas were being discussed.

Scott had been working there for a couple of months when off he was sent to some out-of-state work conference. When he got back, he turned in a handful of receipts. One of these showed that the items for which he expected reimbursement included several porn magazines and a six-pack.

After she fired Scott, Davina gave us the skinny on their uncomfortable receipt-related meeting. She had to point out that, as he surely must know, the university would balk at being asked to buy an employee alcohol and pornography. Not only balk, in fact, but refuse. Refuse and look askance. Refuse, look askance and question who this weirdo was!

Had Scott not checked the receipt? Or maybe he was so clueless that he hadn’t noticed in recent years that these particulars were now printed on receipts? Did he not want to retract that receipt from the others?

He did not. Scott’s attitude was shame-free. He either brazened it out, or else he 100% didn’t get why this was problematic (I told you he was strange). At that point, Davina started to see what the rest of us saw and shortly thereafter, out he went on his ear.

I have wondered from time to time what happened to Scott after that. He had come to Pittsburgh all the way from Wisconsin and his wife (poor thing) was still there, trying to sell their house so she could join him in Pittsburgh. Did he tell her why he’d been fired (I don’t think it was just the bizarro receipt situation, but who knows)? What happened with their house? Are they still together?

You see how overthinking receipts will take you down the weirdest of paths? Well, now you know.

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_{My books are all available on Amazon except for the most recent one. All the Frogs: Laughing While You’re on the Dating Apps is available only via yours truly, by sending $25 and your mailing address to Venmo @VodreyBooksEtc. That covers the book, shipping, etc. I’d be much obliged if you’d hit that heart button, comment and/or re-stack this. Thanks so much for reading, and please consider subscribing — it’s free!}