In 2013, after an AOL employee walked out of a CVS with a 38 inch receipt and the picture spread online, chief marketing officer Rob Price went on Facebook and promised to shrink the ExtraCare portion by about 25 percent. More than a decade later, the receipts are still long enough to have their own memes and Halloween costumes. The length is not an accident. It comes straight out of the loyalty program.
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Card scanned, or phone number punched in at the pad, and the slip’s last few inches fill with coupons, ExtraBucks codes, and offers chosen off purchase history and zip code. Two near identical baskets at the register can produce two different blocks at the bottom of the slip, because the engine reads earlier trips and not the belt today. In his 2013 Facebook post, Price pointed at shoppers who had “asked for ALL the savings and LESS paper.” There was a Send to Card option that was supposed to move offers from paper to the loyalty card. Most stayed on paper.
Craig Rosenblum, a vice president at the marketing firm Inmar Intelligence, told CNN that CVS receipts are “notorious for being longer than just about anybody’s in the industry.” For Rosenblum, the paper is a feature that catches a customer with her wallet out. Deidre Popovich at Texas Tech told CNN the long coupon band works as a reminder of the membership’s value. CVS has explained the system picks from purchase history with other signals from the checkout. The allergy coupon, the most cited example, prints when pollen counts run high in the shopper’s zip code. A hotel receipt runs long for a simpler reason than a CVS slip, the room rate, tax, and incidentals, none of it selling something else.
Mockery has stuck to CVS more than other chains, though the title for the longest receipt is still up for grabs. A Taste of Home writer took a tape to her own slips and got twelve and a half inches for the CVS one against close to fourteen for the myWalgreens. A routine pharmacy stop, even after every trim CVS has announced, can still hand the customer close to fourteen inches of thermal paper.
Each slip is a record of the sale plus something else, a data exchange between CVS and the shopper running through the paper itself. Underneath, on the data side at CVS, sits a system that has logged the member’s basket and the day, then pulls an offer built around bringing her back into the store. ExtraCare had roughly 70 million members by 2016, the year CVS opened a paperless option. Jimmy Kimmel had done the bit for years, including with Obama in 2015. Phil Ting, a California assemblyman, came at paper receipts in 2019 with a bill that went nowhere.
The paperless option has always been in the system, and almost no one chooses it. Going paperless means finding the ExtraCare card, reading an email address one character at a time for the cashier, and trusting the coupons land in an inbox that gets opened. The folding of a yard of fresh receipts on top of two old ones already in her wallet is what keeps the paperless sign up from happening. The slip from a gas pump ends at the total on the gallons.
A hotel receipt handed over at checkout, however many lines, ends at the bottom of the bill. The register at CVS, on the other hand, keeps the printer going past the total, with another tier of coupons whose redemption is uncertain.
Researchers have not put a date on when the CVS receipt goes away. The math from 2013 that put the length there is the math still keeping it there. A few cents on thermal paper traded for one more visit is the bet CVS keeps placing. The email version of the offer ends up in an inbox the shopper may never check. The slip puts it in her hand. CVS has issued apologies about the length more than once. And the printer keeps going.
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