Category: Receipts

I don’t remember how much total rent I paid for a single bedroom in a large house shared...

Wouldn’t it be great if those old telephone numbers, “Astoria 11”, could have been grandfathered into modern times? Descendants of Charles Hallett could say “Yo, give me a call. I’m at ’11’.” This receipt is from a Blackwell to a Hallett. Prime Astoria stuff.

I was thinking it might be time to stop scanning and posting my receipts. Like a lot of things I do it’s become a bit of an irrelevant chore. But then anytime I think such things I look at them again, in particular the random receipts links, and I almost always spot something that gets […]

This receipt makes it look like I got a whopping $402.93 discount on a pack of Perdue chicken drumsticks at the Key Food a few weeks ago. I wonder if mistakes like this throw the grocery store’s accounting into disarray. I just posted 128 new receipts to My Receipts, bringing the total number of scans […]

  Source: Receipts

An unemployment check stub from April 7, 1992.

Today’s Daily Receipt was a winner. Libby’s Chicken Vienna Sausage. Celeste Deluxe Pizza. Pork Chops (Center Cut). Dixie Spoons. Chicken Drumsticks. Frito Scoops.

If you look at a cover of a magazine and see an illusion of the top corner peeled back a little, as if to reveal something behind the cover, that visual element is called a VIOLATOR. Should “Violator” not also be the name for the colored streaks that signal the end of a roll of thermal receipt paper?

An abundance of nostalgia inspired me to buy this ticket to “Godspell,” a show I thought was under-appreciated. “Jesus Christ Superstar” drew far more acclaim, and perhaps rightfully so, but the more low-key sounds of “Godspell” lingered in my mind since childhood. I believe it is the first staged musical I ever saw. I was […]

I placed this $333.33 order from Sheet Music Plus on July 5, 2011. It was shipped 2 weeks later, on July 20, and from there it inexplicably sat in a Jersey City postal facility for about 5 weeks. This shipment took nearly 2 months to arrive. That might be a new record for me, as […]

As much I tried to enjoy this movie, and for as sympathetic as I felt others were in their experience with Littlerock, I came away feeling unmoved, and let down. In some ways the problems I had with this film serve to summarize why I hate movies, and why I watch so few of them: […]

I stared at this receipt from February 10, 2007, for several minutes before remembering what the K-Cafe was, and why I was there. The K-Cafe is a food stand at the K-Mart inside the Metropolitan Mall in Middle Village. Middle Village and the 11379 zip code are not in Flushing, as recorded on this receipt. […]

This receipt records what appears to have been the last purchase I made at Food World before the place got new management and changed over to Key Foods. Part of the space occupied by Food World used to be filled by a bar called McGrath’s. I only barely remember that place. I never knew it, […]

Sabrina, the cashier on this transaction, was not pleased with my purchase. I placed the celery sticks on the conveyor belt and she stated, witheringly, that I needed to get a life if this was all I was going to purchase at Publix. “Big time” was the first phrase she used, followed by “Big spender!” […]

I bought “Modern Ruins: Portraits of a Place in the Mid-Atlantic Region,” for a date night, but the anticipated date night never happened, so the book sits on the table unopened, with two other books of similar vintage. The other two books secured for the failed date night: “Vanishing America: The End of Main Street […]

Having played piano since the 3rd Grade I am surprised, not-quite-horrified, but maybe a little embarrassed to find that it was not until the last month or two that I played through the complete works of Robert Schumann. Whilst growing up it was sometimes uttered that any pianist pursuing a career, or intending to remain […]

Since childhood I have derived mild amusement from reading the muffled, muzzled language of receipts. It is like a code. After the immediate memory of a purchase has faded it can become a project to decipher the space-sensitive names of each item. I imagine anthropologists and historians of the future analyzing this receipt, debating the […]

This was an interesting, if somewhat puzzling encounter. It was over 14 years ago as I write this, but I still remember the meeting to which this follow-up letter of thanks and remuneration refers. I thought the meeting was a sales call. I was unexpectedly whisked away from my work at hand and told to […]

I went to the bank to deposit $131.50 in coins. Coins began to accumulate very quickly in my life many years ago. It was a two-pronged attack of coins: I stopped doing laundry myself, taking my soiled garments instead to a full-service laundromat where I paid cash cash money. And I started using MetroCards for […]

This is a receipt, of sorts, for a purchase of $100,000. $100,000 is about what 4 years at this college cost from 1986 to 1990. I managed (barely) to graduate in 4 years. This is the final transcript of my academic “achievement”, a record which revives some memories I had intentionally and even aggressively buried. […]

I bought these two books whilst planning a road trip through Nebraska. After I got fired from corporate in 2002 I decided to hit the road for a few weeks, and Nebraska was my choice. It’s funny how the receipt truncates and mis-capitalizes the name of the second book. The book is called “Nebraska Off […]

This is the front and back of a telephone call message. I don’t remember the meaning of the stuff on the back but I wrote it. Rockin’ Marsupial? Funky Monkey? Andy Capp’s wit? What? It might have something to do with a word puzzle from a newspaper. The front desk person at the Parc Lincoln […]

This is probably the oldest receipt I have from New York City. I probably received this receipt when ordering a pizza for delivery on Monday, October 29, 1990. I left Florida for New York on October 20, 1990, staying first with a college friend in suburban Philadelphia, then taking a memorable train ride from there […]

I like how the headline for this ATM receipt seems to read DATE TIME MACHINE. I unwittingly left my bank card in this ATM. I came back just minutes later and the card was gone, though I could see that no one after me had entered the building which housed the ATM. This ATM machine […]

At the time of this purchase (August 16, 1992) I was dating a woman who spoke frequently of her days of poverty. She had been living with a man who, equally destitute, resorted to rolling quarters into wrappers and taking those coins to the bank. I found her account of this activity interesting, and all […]

This appears to be the oldest receipt in my collection. From September, 1986, this receipt for $1128.34 records payment for an entry fee of some sort for college. I do not specifically recall this fee, or the occasion of writing a check in this amount, but it is probably the Matriculation Deposit. I remember the […]

This is a receipt for Chinese food delivered to me at 9 Cabrini Boulevard in Washington Heights, on October 7, 1991. I lived at 9 Cabrini for 8 or 9 months in 1991, scoring what seemed like a phenomenally cheap room in a 3-bedroom apartment. Paying only $240 a month for rent I was able […]

“THANKS FOR YOUR BUSSINESS” is probably not intended as a nod to the occasional bus driver that purchases gas at this Mobil station. “BUSSINESS” is a long-running typo that has been present on the receipts of this business for many years. The separation, too, of the “GREEN” and “POINT” is also erroneous, since Greenpoint is […]

This grocery store space had been empty for years. My last receipt from the store which previously occupied this space was from March, 2004, at which time I purchased 4 cans of Chicken Noodle Soup and a bottle of dill hamburger chips. The last iteration of grocery store in this space was called Pioneer, but […]

Since seeing this “concert” (I’ll explain the quotation marks in a moment) I have been writing into a document which I titled “The Road to Elvis.” At present this tome has reached 37,731 words, and it starts with a salute to this unusual concert event at Radio City Music Hall. The road to Elvis took […]