Time to take (trans)action!

I haven't posted in now what amounts to nearly a month. For that I apologize. For the record, the last two weeks I've spent in Houston (with my flight being cancelled twice because of Eastern weather) with my nieces and nephews jumping on me every chance they got. I needed rest from them waking me up at the buttcrack, and lacked the time to blog.

Our daily lives are based upon convenience now. Debit cards, drive-through ATMs, WiFi everywhere ... so why is the receipt holding us back? In this age of environmental consciousness, do we really need to even be printing receipts anymore? Isn't that counterintuitive? Isn't that what bar codes were invented for, or why we have advanced computer systems with inventory tracking metrics? Shoot, businesses know everything about consumers now. They know how much our average shopping ticket is, what particular items we like to buy on a regular basis, even how many kids we have. It's mind boggling. Yet we're still printing out a piece of paper telling us what we bought. Hmm.

I ran across the street from my apartment to Rite Aid the other day. I bought five items. My receipt was 14.25 inches long. Over a foot long! To list five friggin' items! I'm not going to even mention the things that were on there; but suffice it to say that piece of paper went directly into the garbage. What a waste. Forgive me, but if I really needed to return my mini hand sanitizer, couldn't the cashier have simply scanned the bar code and seen that I purchased my Purell on X date and Y time? Honestly, by the time she found the product on that laundry list of a receipt, NFL players will have stopped beating up their girls. And who wants that, ya know?

I recycle, I try to take reusable bags with me when I go shopping, I try not cook more than is needed so as to not waste food, and yet Blockbuster is fucking me up! I know most of you use NetFlix by now, but have you been in a Blockbuster recently? Checkout takes 30 seconds, but then I have to wait two minutes for three ridiculous receipts to print out. Waste, waste, waste. Annoying, annoying, annoying.

It's time to make printed receipts like a "Dancing with the Stars" cast--irrelevant.