Punk’s Posterous

Most businesses now give you the option of whether or not you want to a receipt with your purchase.  Unless the purchase is substantial (where a record needs to be kept for tax purposes or to dispute a payment claim in the future) the actual paper receipt provides little to no value.  But an itemized record (not just the dollar amount to a store taken from a credit card bill) of what you purchase coupled with [available] meta-data for that purchase can have significant benefit to the overall analysis of your life.  

Applications that track personal statistics have only recently exploded garnering wide adoption into the mainstream.  Personal productivity, finance, fitness and nutrition applications are some of the best selling iPhone applications and happen to be one of the few pay for service portals that retain customers past a trial period.  Its not just the neurotic who find joy in improving themselves based on statistical analysis. 

The entry of data into any one of these applications comes from predominately three methods.  There is of course, the manual input that the user enters, devices that track statistics that upload their data for analysis, and information gleamed from other sources such as credit card bills or other tracking services.  

But because each application is independent of one another, the onus is on the user to update each application and make use of it.  This can be directly attributed to the iPhone's inability to run third party applications in the background.  This limitation makes it impossible for any given app to collect real time statistics and update itself.  Even the financial apps that take information from user authenticated credit card records are typically delayed 24 hours.  The tedium involved in updating all these different applications is the largest barrier to their usefulness.

And yet, all the information needed to statistically analyze your life is handed to you on a printed receipt every time you do something (which interestingly anytime you do something costs you money-- we'll save that for another post).  

Here is an example:

I recently flew to Nashville, Tennessee, where I took a road trip to the Smokey Mountains for a short Holiday.  I actually kept all the receipts over the course of the 4 day trip and came back with 26 pieces of paper documenting every step of my trip.  And this was a getting away from it all kind of trip.

Now to update all my different information stores, I'd have to spend hours in different applications uploading what I ate (for nutrition), where I hiked (for fitness), what I spent on food (for food budget) and entertainment (for entertainment budget), as well as pictures and videos to share with family and friends.  For most people (myself included) the work involved outweighs the end value.  However, if this was all updated realtime with no effort from me, I'd be VERY interested in the results as I'm sure many others would.

Is the solution then to wait for Apple to allow applications to run as background processes, or for Palm to actually put out their SDK to developers?

Even in doing so, I'm not sure that'll provide a cohesive solution.

What would be interesting is if Apple (or Palm) had a background process that simply collected xml data from a variety of sources that upon an application being opened would parse this data store for information relevant to its function to give you updated statistics without any input from you.

For example, during the road trip, an obligatory glutton session at McDonald's was held to uphold road trip tradition.  Rather than receiving a paper receipt outlining my sins, if the register instead sent the information in XML format to my iPhone (that required no action from me; just sent a notification letting me know it was received), when puzzled at my weight gain later in the week, I open up Mint Nutrition which parses the data store, takes all the relevant food information and shows my eating habits.

The XML receipt in the data store might look like:

<Restaurant>Mcdonalds</Restaurant>

<Address>1304 Main Street, Chattonoga, Tennessee</address>

<telephone> 615-555-5555</telephone>

<timestamp>08:56</timestamp>

<date>07032009</date>

<food order><quantity>1</quantity>Big Breakfast</food order><price>2.99</price>

Upon starting my iPhone Mint Financial application sunday night as I do my finances, this information is read in and factored into my food budget.  When I start my nutrition application to reconcile weight gain in the AM, this same information is read in and does a calorie count for this particular breakfast (which in this case would be atrocious).  And when I started my fitness app before a run, it would take this information and let me know how far or how hard I'll have to run to balance this intake.

None of these applications need to be run as a background process because part of their purpose it to take the XML information that is inherently stored and make use of it based on the app's speciality.  Of course if there is an XML receipt for a new widget I purchase, the nutrition and fitness app would simply ignore it.

This would be great for the consumer, but what is the incentive for a business to provide this service.  One might argue, for McDonald's this might actually deter customers.  There is obviously a significant cost associated with printing receipts.  Take a look at the following analysis:

Current
Average receipt length    12    inches
Roll of receipt tape    2640    inches
Cost of receipt tape roll    0.9    dollars
Receipt printer ribbon    1.92    dollars
Ribbon head print capacity    20000    receipts

Average # of receipts per roll (roll length/receipt length)    220
Average # of receipts per day (# of transactions * # of stores)    177,000
Receipt tape used per day (receipt length * # of receipts/day)    2,124,000
Receipt tape rolls used per day (receipt tape usage/length of roll)    805
# of rolls used per year (rolls used per day * 365)    293,659

Cost of rolls per year (rolls used per year * cost of roll)    $264,293.18    Dollars
Average # of printer ribbons used per day (# of receipts per day/print capacity)    8.85
Average # of printer ribbons used per year (ribbons used per day * # of printers used per day)    3230.25
Cost of printer ribbons per year (# of printer ribbons per year * cost of printer ribbon)    $6,202.08    Dollars
Cost of printer ribbon + rolls per year    $270,495.26
# of Harris Teeter Stores Globally    177
Cost of printer ribbon + rolls per year globally    $47,877,661.34
Potential savings by reducing receipt printing by 5%    $2,393,883.07

# of rolls per printer ribbon    90.91
# of transactions per day per store    1000

Most stores already have some wireless infrastructure, but even if there is a margin of discrepancy with this analysis, a compelling ROI could be made for any additional technology that would need to be purchased for implementation.

A franchise like Subway might use this as a marketing opportunity as their overall healthy alternative brand so much so your own fitness apps will prove it.