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What's bad: The bubble chart. Even if you thought a report by category was useful, comparing areas is really hard on the brain; it should have been a table or bar chart.

What's meh: The bars for price. Maybe they help; maybe they make my already-to-long receipt every longer.

What's great: Sort by category then by price descending. Helps for both finding items on a long receipt, and also getting a quick glance at the most important (read: expensive) ones. It's a simple improvement that only sacrifices the historic streaming print of a receipt. I'll accept if I have to look in to a couple places before I find it. I did just visit the grocery store after all.

> Sort by category then by price descending.

Yes, that is genuinely useful. The percentages could even be in the category headers, for those who want that sort of breakdown.

I like it more than the old fashioned receipt it seeks to replace. I would look at it and it would bring me a small, fleeting bit of joy.

I prefer no receipts at all, but that doesn't seem to be a universal option. So if I'm going to get the paper receipt anyway, may as well have some pleasing design applied to it, and a thought-provoking categorization for me to reflect upon before I crumple and toss the thing. Beats the pants off of the old version.

If I was reading a business plan and being asked to invest, yeah, I'd respond to it your way too. As a "thing that could exist", though, I appreciate it.

I just don't think groceries are the right market for this. For "joy", the differentiator has to be in-person customer service, because grocery margins are razor-thin, and the last thing any exec wants to propose is to modify the ERP (there be dragons) so it generates the clean data that's required for visualizations.

At my store, they are pushing to reduce checkout staff by "encouraging" customers to use self-checkout. It hasn't been going well, but this is a retail-wide trend, and cost-cutting pressures are immense.

Again, because this is so data-centric, the visualizations will generate errors and miscategorizations that will confuse customers more than if they had ye olde dot matrix printed receipt.

> At my store, they are pushing to reduce checkout staff by "encouraging" customers to use self-checkout. It hasn't been going well, but this is a retail-wide trend, and cost-cutting pressures are immense.

This infuriates me so much, I started to see if I could game the system. Fruit is the easy part, you fill your bag with the expensive fruit, and select apples or something cheap on the checkout scale. Works better on larger stores, the minimum wage person overseeing 6 self-checkout machines can't watch everything, maybe half the people need help, or the scale borks for some reason.

My local supermarket replaced pre-packaged bread bags, weighted by the employees with a complete alacarte system which is complete shitshow. You pick the bread on one place, do your entire shopping and then have to remember what kind of SKU have you chosen. It's a complete waste of time for everyone, and I'm pretty sure the surrounding traditional bakeries won here, the bread selection has lowered substantially on the supermarket.

So you're "infuriated" that retail stores have to cut staff in order to survive, yet in the next breath you boast about how simple it is to steal from the store? I see you also didn't forget to belittle the hapless "minimum wage person" who you're purporting to care about.

> yet in the next breath you boast about how simple it is to steal from the store?

> I see you also didn't forget to belittle the hapless "minimum wage person" who you're purporting to care about.

That's my point. The employees are valuable, even in a pure profit-driven analysis.

> retail stores have to cut staff in order to survive

This is completely false, "surviving" is not the word to describe retailers.

We track our spending based on budget categories. Grocery stores are the toughest, as items bought there might fall into the category of "food" or "personal care" or "household items" or "pets" or other categories.

Most receipts are easy - the name of the store is all we need to know what category that spending falls into. Grocery receipts we generally have to look at items and divide.

This sort of information would make that a whole lot easier.

What if we were able to have our receipts sent and associated with our credit card transactions auto magically. Then we could openly export and perform our own analysis using that information.

At some point grocery chains may include that feature on their apps, which for the most part mostly focus on displaying coupons. The app would include the breakdowns and amounts spent, I can see that helping with customer loyalty.

> Struggling to understand the use case for this.

The article lays out the use case for this near the beginning. Having the information laid out on the receipt like this provides at a quick glance the relative cost of the items you purchased.

I tried to address this in my comment. The "at a glance" info works in a ideal environment where all items are accurately and uniformly classified across the database, which is far from a given. Those databases are meant to serve the goals of supply chain and finance people, and they won't agree to a change in their product coding processes so that customer receipts can now generate a bubble chart.

But what's the use case for having that overview on the receipt? What would you do with it?

I, too, don't really understand the purpose. It wouldn't bother me if those circles were there, but I don't know what good it would do me.

We track our spending based on budget categories. Grocery stores are the toughest, as items bought there might fall into the category of "food" or "personal care" or "household items" or "pets" or other categories.

Most receipts are easy - the name of the store is all we need to know what category that spending falls into. Grocery receipts we generally have to look at items and divide.

This sort of information would make that a whole lot easier.

I'm not wondering about the usefulness of categorization (so long as the categories are standardized). I'm wondering about the usefulness of those circles.

How is it useful to know what percentage of spending went in each category in a single grocery trip? You can't combine that data with the same data from other grocery trips, and the only way I can think that knowing what percentage of spending went into what category is if it's done broadly, such as for all shopping in a given week or month.

Struggling to understand the use case for this

It could be grouped slightly differently to organise items into food groups: imagine doing a weekly shop, then finding out that most of your shop is carbs and sugar. This may not be news to you, but if you're trying to eat a more balanced diet then it could help.

https://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Goodfood/Documents/The-Eatwell-G...

Even then, wouldn't the weighting of the items be based on cost, and not nutritional value per serving? 1L tub of ice cream is usually cheaper than a 1lb steak. And even then, you likely aren't consuming the two items at the same rate. So on trip #2, you might buy another steak, but you won't be buying another tub of ice cream.