Keep your receipts!

This past year has been a very tough one; it has represented the largest transfer of wealth in human history. The level of suffering and inequality is staggering.

Corporations have had their way with our system. Despite providing a wide range of products and services we depend on, corporations manipulate and take advantage of us at every turn and to the maximum. They’re in a perpetual state of stealing, plotting, and spying.

Therefore, I generally look to deploy every advantage available in our playbook to alleviate their level of thievery to whatever degree possible. For this reason, my blog will include a consumer guide component with many parts. This is part one: Receipts.

It’s always important to keep your receipts! I used to never get mine printed for environmental reasons, so abstaining from getting receipts for this reason definitely resonates with me. If this is you right now, I applaud you and am with you, spiritually. However, I do get paper receipts now, only whenever digital isn’t possible or when there is a strategic reason for needing a hard copy. I do not get paper bank statements etc.

I’ve found that the savings and general benefits of keeping your receipts and documentation can be pretty massive. It can seem like a daunting task to keep all your receipts, but having a system in place simplifies the matter. A shoebox or a ziplock bag consistently housing your crumpled receipts is a great system.

Simply organize them later by store. One of those accordion folders seems like the oceanside mansion of receipt storage options. I’ve made the most ridiculous returns due to meticulous keeping of receipts. These include returning fruit. Below is real footage of such an instance. The video also delves into one of the many ways I differ from Jerry Seinfeld.

I’d like to add here that these are techniques I would use exclusively in a large (corporate/chain) store. I would never attempt to return fruit to a street cart or a smaller business that cannot easily swallow this loss. This is an important distinction. Do not use these techniques on small mom-and-pop stores, artists, or people charging you a fair rate for difficult specialized labor or who are sacrificing and going hard after their passion.

There is an assault on our attention span. We live in an exploitative attention extraction economy. So, it’s important to develop good receipt habits. Maintaining mindfulness is always a challenge, so keeping your receipts in one consistent place can help make it a muscle memory habit.

Using the same jacket pocket or bag compartment until you transfer it into your home receipt box is a perfect solution. It feels great to be able to pull out a receipt whenever you have a problem. Like the above crisis with the mangoes. But in all seriousness, during these times, every little bit helps, and sometimes these receipts belong to expensive electronics, appliances, machinery. (I highly advise taking receipt photos in any situations where you don’t have a digital copy of a large purchase in your inbox.

Receipts contain a lot of critical information that you should familiarize yourself with. Ideally, you should know various return policies before making your purchase (these can be researched online, usually directly on the store website), but they will be printed on your receipt. Some stores write the last date returns are applicable on the top of the receipt. This is rare and usually applies to large corporations with generous return policies such as Target.

When buying electronics, there is a wide range of return policies that can impact you in drastically different ways. Receipts and keeping yourself knowledgeable with the policy can be money and time-saving. Arguing with customer service is exhausting, draining, and energy-intensive.

I’ll be discussing ways to strategize various purchases around return policy and other price-saving measures. For now, I’m starting with a foundational stick-to-basic. Keep your receipt, read your receipt, store and organize your receipt. It just could save you some money, and more importantly, heartache.

All this being said, I think to whatever degree possible, you should refrain from shopping at huge corporate stores. Any store with a huge marketing budget that you’ve seen on TV commercials deserves our business far less than local small businesses. These businesses have struggled drastically this past year and in past years due to increasing automation and Amazon-ification of the world.

In addition, definitely support small businesses, Black-owned, LGBTQIA+ businesses, etc. All our purchases are a vote. There are moments where we cannot spend our dollars where we wish. For this reason, it is important to protect every dollar in these circumstances. We must make sure we are not trapped into keeping an item we’d like to liquidate back to the full purchase price, simply because we cannot find our receipt!