The end of the printing of receipts was initially scheduled to take place in January. It has already been postponed twice.
Inflation offers a little respite to the receipt: after two postponements, the end of its systematic printing will finally take place only on August 1 to allow consumers to continue to consult it in this period of waltz in prices.
This measure taken in the name of ecology with the aim of reducing the production of waste, also concerns bank card tickets and purchase vouchers. Initially due to come into force on January 1, 2023, it had again been postponed to April 1.
But citing the inflationary context, the government had once again postponed the deadline to the end of March, without immediately advancing a new date. It will therefore finally be August 1, according to a decree published on Saturday in the Official Journal.
Last Sunday, the cabinet of Olivia Grégoire, Minister Delegate for Trade, had assured that the new postponement did not call “not at all in question the merits of this common sense measure“but came under a decision”pragmatic“, adapted to the “contextinflationary.
“When you have 15% inflation on the shelves, when the receipt is a benchmark for many French people, it seemed important to us to keep this benchmark” time to “pass the inflationary peak“, he had argued.
The end of the systematic printing of receipts at the end of a commercial transaction – unless explicitly requested by the customer – stems from the law “anti-waste and circular economy», voted in 2020.
The measure aims to reduce the production of waste, while nearly 30 billion tickets are printed each year in France. But faced with the waltz in prices, especially for food products in supermarkets, many consumers continue to frequently consult their receipt to check the details of their shopping.
“Not practical”
“It saves money, it’s good for the planet, I know… But for my accounts, looking all the time on the internet, it’s not practical“, grumbled Jean-Claude Glissant, a forty-year-old recently interviewed by AFP at the exit of the E.Leclerc hypermarket in Pantin, in Seine-Saint-Denis.
Lucia Freixeda, 62 and not yet retired, showed her own receipt. “There’s a mistake there, see? On the terminal inside the store, it was marked 1.99 euros, and there it is 2.99 euros“, she explained. When the tickets will no longer be offered automatically by the shops, it “will still ask“. In Toulouse, in a central district, the idea of receiving his ticket electronically made Ahmed Sessi, 74, smile, who considered himself “too old to understand how it works“.
According to Perifem, an association that brings together distribution players around energy or environmental issues, the French are “even more than half say they want to request a paper ticket“. Its general delegate, Franck Charton, had thus welcomed the new postponement last Sunday “so that brands organize themselves to offer alternative dematerialized solutions“.
The Cnil, the commission guaranteeing freedoms in the face of digital technology, published its recommendations on March 10 for the respect of consumer privacy, evoking solutions allowing to obtain a receipt without communicating personal details, such as the QR Code .
Consumer associations such as UFC-Que Choisir and Rural Families have also expressed many reservations about the announced abolition of the receipt. According to the text of the decree, the tickets indicating a canceled banking transaction, subject to a pre-authorization regime or subject to a credit must always be printed automatically. Tickets mentioning the duration of a legal guarantee are also not concerned.