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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> or\u00a0SUNSHINE CHEEZ-IT WHITE CHED<\/a>. 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…<\/p>\n Handwritten Receipt<\/p><\/div>\n …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 \u00bd pepperoni and \u00bd 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23226,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital-hoarding","category-receipts","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/pizza_901029-me1-586x1024-4.jpg?fit=586%2C1024&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-4cg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Handwritten](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/mobi\/37\/2018\/02\/pizza_901029-me1-586x1024.jpg?resize=586%2C1024&ssl=1\")