Green America estimated that the U.S. goes through more than 250000 tons of thermal paper for receipts every year, and when they surveyed consumers, 89% said they wanted retailers to at least offer a digital option. That number included people who still prefer paper. CVS started pushing its digital receipt program harder around 2019, mostly in response to pressure from Green America’s Skip the Slip campaign and a few thousand customers who contacted the company on social media about it, and the pandemic accelerated things because suddenly nobody wanted to touch anything at checkout. The company says the program has saved 49 million yards of receipt paper across its 9000 or so stores. Target switched to phenol free paper for whatever still prints and funnels people toward the Circle app. Walmart’s self checkout screens default to no paper in most stores now. Rachel Hirsch, a retail operations consultant based in Charlotte, said she started noticing the shift around the middle of 2024 when she was doing floor audits at a few chains in the Southeast. “The prompt changed,” she told me. “It used to be an opt in for email. Now, paper is the opt in. Nobody made a big deal about it, but that’s a totally different starting position.” The younger shoppers were already there. Fewer than a third of people under 25 were choosing paper when given the choice, according to the Green America data. About half of the people 55 and older still preferred a printed slip.
Once the big chains change the default, the expectation shows up everywhere else pretty fast. Tom Nguyen does HVAC work out of Scottsdale and has been running his own business for about fifteen years. He told me clients started asking for emailed receipts sometime in 2024, usually because they wanted something searchable for an insurance claim or a home warranty filing, and he didn’t have a way to do it. He had a receipt book with carbon paper. “I told a woman I couldn’t email her the receipt for a 3200 dollar AC install, and she just kind of stared at me,” he said. He bought a Square terminal three or four months after that, and turning on the digital receipt feature took about an hour. The rest of it was more of a headache because he had to figure out a new invoicing setup and get his customer information moved over, and that part stretched on for a couple of weeks. He’s not sure it’s saved him any real money yet. He thinks it probably has on paper costs, but he hasn’t looked at the numbers.
Yocuda provides digital receipt platforms to brands including Longchamp and Decathlon, and their data shows that digital receipts get about a 75% open rate. Promotional emails, the regular kind that retailers send out on Tuesdays, get maybe 20 to 25% if they’re lucky. Longchamp sent about 590000 digital receipts in 2024 and reported a 73% open rate and a 5.5% click through on embedded content. Most email campaigns don’t get anywhere near that. Decathlon, headquartered in France, where automatic paper receipt printing was banned in August 2023, now puts workout video links and loyalty point balances, and local event promotions inside its digital receipts, and customers open them voluntarily because they want to see what they spent.
Washington became the first state to formally ban bisphenol containing thermal paper. Enforcement starts January 1, 2026. California already lists BPA and BPS under Proposition 65, and New York introduced a Senate bill in January 2025 that would ban BPA from business transaction paper statewide. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has been running grants and technical assistance programs to get small businesses off thermal paper for a few years. Greg Poulos runs a sandwich shop on the north end of Milwaukee, with six employees, maybe 200 transactions on a busy day. He told me he didn’t know receipt paper had chemicals in it until a health inspector brought it up during a routine visit. The MPCA has published data showing that a single thermal receipt can contain BPA at 250 to 1000 times the concentration you’d find in a lined food can. CDC biomonitoring found BPA in 93% of Americans over the age of six. Retail workers had about 30% more in their bodies than the national average. Poulos had been thinking about going digital for a while because a customer asked him to email a catering receipt once, and he couldn’t, and the BPA conversation made him feel like he’d been dragging his feet. He switched to Square. About one in ten customers still ask for paper. His paper costs went from maybe 45 dollars a month to almost nothing, though he said he didn’t notice the savings at the time because he was dealing with the hassle of learning a new system.
A documentation specialist at myreceiptmaker.com said most of the small businesses reaching out with questions about digital receipts are doing it because a customer asked, and they realized they couldn’t deliver. Almost nobody calls because they went looking for a better system on their own. Birchwood Cafe in Minneapolis cut 130 rolls of thermal paper per year after making the switch and saved about 195 dollars in supplies. The staff there said the bigger deal was not having to count and enter tip receipts every night by hand anymore, something they’d been doing for years without really questioning it. A brewery nearby went fully paperless on credit card transactions. The digital receipts market was valued at roughly 1.73 billion dollars in 2024. Projections put it at 9 billion by 2035. The UK has 84% of its retailers offering a digital option already. Those are big numbers, and they probably mean something for the industry broadly, but on the ground level, it’s still one business at a time deciding whether to spend a few hundred dollars on a new terminal or keep handing out paper until somebody tells them they can’t.
