Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/09/this-isnt-an-ikea-receipt-i.html
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Be warned, they only come in sets of two- something about reducing production waste by having only one kind of receipt printer. You get a rug receipt for the receipt rug you just purchased. If you return the receipt rug, you still end up with one giant rug receipt for the rug but with a black pen mark check across it. Sometimes they give you a second large receipt rug that is longer and stapled to the back of the previous receipt for the rug that is now defaced. I left mine in the sun on a hot day and half of it darkened. Lucky for me I a gigantic Ikea recycling bin called SORTERA, STOR. It takes up a lot of room, but I can fit a few of those giant rug receipts in it before I have to get help emptying it.
It’s late, I have to go. I’m working on a modest proposal for a local school that is having trouble generating revenue. It’s possible that the kids could provide labor to local businesses, as long as they volunteers. The school just has become a placement service and charge for their services. They kill two, er three, birds with one stone. The school won’t be burdened with location or educational costs(because the students will be working… I mean practice experiential learning), and they can “hire” their own students as unpaid interns and they generate money to run the school.
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CVS considered a similar product, but they were unable to find a room capable of fitting it due to length.
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sigh… I dislike lazy artist.
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Of course you have reminded me of this post:
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Indeed. About a month a got one taller than me, and I’m 5’11"
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not even for weddings?
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I work for a very large retailer, and once did a project on receipt length. I calculated that each line on the receipt cost the company about $15000/year in receipt tape alone. So for an experiment I squeezed the receipt as short as it could possibly be, eliminating all extraneous spaces, blank lines, everything, and set the density to 8 lines per inch instead of 6 lines per inch. A one-item purchase with cash came out on a receipt that was shorter than it was wide, and resembled a fortune cookie. But was so dense that it was almost impossible to understand, and would have been very easy to lose.
So I started over, leaving the information in the same places but eliminating almost all the white space lines. Extra copies of stuff (like always printing gift receipts or other marketing junk, which had been common) were eliminated. We had the return information custom printed on the back of the tape, allowing us to eliminate printing the return terms and conditions on the face. Eventually, the one item receipts became just slightly longer than a square, and were still very legible. Best of all we saved a couple million dollars per year on paper costs and kept about half the paper out of the landfills.
Every time I see a cashier handing out a ridiculous foot long receipt scroll in three-part triplicate, I think “This is a company who still doesn’t get it.”
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It really ties the room together.
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This is actually a significantly self-aware work for IKEA to get behind and make available as a product.
No matter how you analyze or critique the rug, it quickly goes to a place that can be seen as less than complementary to IKEA. And a risk for whoever stood up and pushed/sold this idea.
It’s so meta. It’s really kind of interesting… but I don’t want to live with something “conceptually interesting” as opposed to aesthetically interesting. You’d need a big home/apartment and a lot of IKEA products before the irony (don’t cross me on this; I’ve got a thesaurus) behind the rug was self-evident enough to make it worthwhile.
There’s more than a little Warhol there. I’m mildly entertained. Good night.
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I came in here specifically to suggest a CVS stair runner… Nicely done, both of you! 
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I would really like to see sales receipts integrated into Apple Pay (and its alternatives) so that each Apple Pay transaction stores a digital receipt “image” (that I can then choose to keep or delete). I know that Apple Pay does record the transactions, but these are not the “Sales Receipt” in the legal or contractual sense.
Once this is in practice, the assumption can be made that Apple Pay customers only get a paper receipt on request.
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Eh. It’s pretty much the mildest form of criticism possible. “Your receipts are too long!” It’s not like it’s a critique of the shit-quality of their disposable furniture or what that says about unchecked consumerism.
To me, it seems like Ikea’s trying really hard to “prove” that they’re cool and self-deprecating.
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Cash: 1.000,00
It suggests the person has only 500 euro notes, which is a bit strange. And is buying rugs. That would have to be Paul Manafort.
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You got me to look closely at the picture, and I just realized that it’s a receipt for a “receipt rug”. It’s…it’s…self-referential!
Beyond the length, the usage of English words like Receipt Rug is a way to put this in the realm of artsy unicorns.
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