Blog Assignment 2

My topic for the second blog assignment is about one thing that I think is really unnecessary and something that most people probably will not even use once they have received it. I am talking about the huge waste of paper that is occurring as soon as we make a purchase and we receive a receipt.

Imagine this, we buy something and take the receipt just in case something will happen but the tendency is that the receipt will get thrown away in the litter bin within the next 24 hours or be in our wallets until it is time to throw away all receipts that are there due to the lack of space. Even if we do not want to have the receipt, they will still be printed and thrown away by the clerk but to what use, none that I can see. Are we not using enough paper as it is or do we really have to waste this much where the receipt will be thrown away without being used? But the receipt is the proof that you have purchased something in the store but if we do not want the receipt, why do they have to print it out? Even though that it is written in the law book that a receipt must be printed it is totally useless at some points. A receipt should be optional and if you want to have it they should print it out but otherwise they should not print it.

Grocery stores are one good example where the receipt is useless as we seldom exchange products that we purchased there. Besides, you do not need a receipt if you want to change a product if you made the purchase by card and not by hard cash. That transaction works as a receipt in itself but there are many people that are unaware of this. But there are some situations where a receipt is necessary to have, for example when gambling to prove that you are the winner and companies must keep receipts in order to strengthen their auditing.

We should make the receipt optional and not standard as we seldom use the receipts. Many trees could be saved and this could help against the global warming as more trees are there to protect us. At the moment I think that it is totally useless to receive something that you will throw away shortly after you got it. With the reduction in chopped down trees, this could also mean that the company has the chance to save money as they will print less receipts, thus reducing the waste of paper.

Blog Assignment 1

i) One aspect about daily life that I hope will disappear altogether in the near future is the use of overhead pictures during classes. As a student, classes are a part of daily life and with a constant development of projectors, the usage of overhead pictures is becoming more old fashioned and belongs to a time before we could fully utilize projectors and power point slides. The use of overhead pictures is already at this point experiencing a diminishing in use which is why I think they will disappear in the near future.

ii) Another aspect of daily life that I think will decrease in usage or disappear altogether within the coming 6-50 years is the use of hard cash. We can already see this happening in some of the Swedish banks as they have removed the use of hard cash in order to avoid money laundering and robbery. More transactions are now done over Internet and/or by card and stores have implemented specific check outs where the only available payment is done by card. In some stores, the only way to pay is by card so there are many indications that we are going towards a hard cash free living.