I guess it’s been 3 or 4 years now since I started taking pictures of my receipts and using an app to send them to a company in Florida doing market research into what people buy. I haven’t cared much about my data being accumulated and monetized, though it has started to bother me just a little bit that companies out there make a living off the mere existence of those such as myself and your bad self.
Apps like these came to my attention via the big ex-gf, who introduced me to one such app that I used for a while but gave up on in favor of another similar but easier-to-use app. Even though the app in question now is not the same one she suggested I always give her “credit” for pointing me to what I have used. In a similar way every time I use the Aeropress coffee maker I see the face of the bartender acquaintance who recommended it to me 3 or 4 years ago.
The incentive for sending images of my receipts has been gift cards and cash rewards, with the biggest hauls being a $100 Amazon credit and a $50 restaurant.com voucher I will probably never use because of the minimum purchase requirements. I did the math and I think it took something like 66 weeks to get to the $100 Amazon credit. Since then about 60 weeks have passed and at most I could only cash out a paltry $50. I’m also encountering more glitches in the functioning of the app than ever, and the rules have changed so that I have to send images of receipts within the same week that I get them. That’s just too demanding for such a task. It’s not worth it anymore, not that it ever really was.
I don’t do these kind of things, take surveys and polls that promise gift cards and cash for filling out forms and surfing the web. But I was drawn to this one because putting my receipts to work is something I’ve thought about for as long as I have scanned and posted receipts to my website. Every single scrap of this detritus has a tale behind it, and the composite could be said to comprise some definable arc of stories.
For a long time I put ads on some of the individual receipt pages, and here or there those ads did well. But ads don’t work anymore, not on receipts and not on anything I do.
I think there is something deeper to be gleaned from studying one man’s receipts, even if they do not record anything close to a comprehensive or even summary of every transaction. Not included are call records and credit card transactions for which no itemized receipt was issued.
I didn’t just scan the receipts and slap ads on them. In many cases I added store information and links to their websites, maps, photos of the exterior, that kind of thing. I tried to make the receipts a useful resource for anyone who happened to land on them. In a relatively small number of instances I wrote of memorable or not-so-memorable stories about my experience there. It was not usually a review type of writeup but more a case of using the receipts and the decision-making processes they recorded as writing prompts. There are far too many receipts for me to have done this for all or even a small percentage of them but a few of the stories survive here.
Those surviving stories are a small percentage of what had been out there before. The receipts and all my sites were destroyed by Chinese hackers and, in the case of the receipt stories and a number of things on other websites, I had no backup. The scanned receipts themselves were backed up but the stories were not.
It was, by my estimate, a clever implementation, at least by web standards of the day. Pointing your mouse at a particular item on a receipt might bring up a story about that item, or a photo of it on the shelf of the store. I never used FLash, only CSS and Javascript mouseover libraries. Today I think in terms of OCR and running the whole batch of 10,000 or so receipts through ABBYY Finereader, pumping out oceans of text detailing every purchase on record of PERDUE DRUMSTICKS or SUNSHINE CHEEZ-IT WHITE CHED. All that text would have to be sorted and filtered for it to be any kind of interesting or useful. I can do that kind of text munging but the obvious question of “Why?” arises. Even with a suitable justification a significant quantity of receipts would not be usable. Handwritten receipts, obviously, would elude the OCR software’s abilities…
Handwritten Receipt
…as would certain other items which are otherwise unreadable. That happens to be what I believe to be my first receipt from New York City, for a large pizza ½ pepperoni and ½ sausage. I stayed at a college friend’s place on West 91st Street the night of October 29, 1990, though that was not my first night in New York. That would have been a week earlier, when I stayed at another college friend’s place on West 57th Street. Years later that individual would try and get me a job at Carnegie Hall, a place I later heard time and again was a hell-hole for those who worked there.
