Last night I visited a new self-serve frozen yogurt shop with my family. None of us have ever been there before. I paid with a credit card, and my wife received a receipt to her personal email address. They didn’t ask for the email address, she didn’t give it to them. The sender was not from Crave’s domain name but was from squareup.com. Looks like they are a merchant acquirer, specializing in card readers as smartphone attachments. But how would they get our email? Do merchants provide that?
If the email didn’t come from Crave but from the credit card processor then my guess is that some other merchant uses square up and your wife gave them her email address.
If that happened to me I’d be annoyed and probably go write something on Square Up’s Facebook page about it. I’d probably mention it on Crave’s Facebook page as well since it’s very likely that they opted into that service to get a lower rate.
Sidenote, if you go to a business’s facebook page you now have to click a little button at the top to change it from ‘highlights’ to ‘posts by others’ to see what other people are writing on that page. I assume that’s so it’s harder to see customer complaints.
That reminds me of something that just happened to me a while ago:
At least five years ago, I used a friend’s name and address (with their permission) to submit a second rebate request for some purchases. I used an email address that I control on the rebate form. A few weeks ago, I got an email from the store that sponsored the rebate that said something like “Thank you [name of friend] for signing up for a rewards card. For your convenience, we have linked your rewards account to your email address. Look for special offers in your email!” This friend never knew about the email account.
In our brave new world of cheap mass storage, no bit of data about you is ever deleted. I agree with Joey P that the credit processor probably has the email address from some other transaction at some other merchant.
Does the bank that issues your credit card have your e-mail address? Maybe it’s an agreement between your bank and squareup to provide paperless receipts to save money.
God, stop with the receipts already. Wendy’s, I do not need a receipt for a purchase of fries. If they start emailing this stuff to me, I’m going to go live in a cave.
It’s not about the receipt. The current practice of collecting customer email addresses “to send you green, earth-saving e-receipt” is the latest way to get additional consumer data from a transaction. Most stores have no way to connect the sweaty, mouth-breathing you in front of them with the valuable e-world you… this is an increasingly common one.
I can see it being a useful feature for some situations though. Anybody running a small businesses might like it.
Or maybe with college kids- mom and dad can load money on the card and see where it all goes.
It’s not just about you. They need you to have a receipt for a purchase of fries so that when you get to the second window you can’t claim to have purchased 4 doubles with cheese, 6 fries, and 8 Cokes. Because the first thing they’ll say if you claim you did is, show us the receipt we just gave you.
Square makes POS systems for the iPad. At the end of every transaction, it gives you the choice of receipt via email, SMS or nothing. If you choose email and you’ve entered your email at any previous square POS, it will remember it for you rather than asking you to type it again.
It’s likely what happened was that your wife hit the email receipt button without really looking and that she previously entered her email into square at some earlier point. If she doesn’t want an email receipt in the future, she can always select the no receipt option.
Also, receipts (especially when coupled with the “your order free if we didn’t give you a receipt” thing) cut down on employee theft. This probably isn’t so much true at Wendy’s, which has their order fulfillment system (does that have a technical term? I’m talking about the monitors used by the people actually getting your order ready.) integrated with their POS system, but absent that, employees could do the order without the POS entirely and pocket the cash you just gave them, with no one being the wiser.
I will add, as a Square-using merchant, I cannot access the customer’s email address after the transaction. I can only see an obfuscated version of the address afterward in my transaction reports. Square itself handles the email address and sending the receipt, and the merchant is incapable of using it for anything else.
Receipts are good, and on the overall scale of things, a few square inches of paper are not going to contribute to global catastrophe. They will likely become a victim of more widespread e-payment within the decade.
in the meantime, giving retailers your email address is to be avoided on general principles. Cleophus’s post has the gist of the why of that: it’s not the individual retailer who will misuse the information; it’s the data collators above them who will. That act may seem benign but it’s one more datum in your overall consumer profile that benefits no one - especially not you - except the mass merchandisers. Refuse to do it and tell somoone above the level of hapless clerk why you’re refusing.
That said, using Square has some benefits over just using your credit card. Someone is going to get your buying patterns no matter what. If you use Square, then they get to see what you’re buying, but your credit card won’t, since they’ll only get a generic charge from Square. But Square can’t tie your patterns to a physical address, whereas the credit card can. Dividing the information this way is a net privacy advantage for the consumer.
I haven’t had to give a receipt for stuff like this in a while. They just look at the order in the computer. If it’s wrong, the receipt will be wrong, too, as it means the order taker didn’t put it in correctly.
The only way your idea works is if there’s an order mixup. Which is good, because, in your scenario, it would be easy to show up with a fake receipt.
Certainly the businesses will use all this information they have about you, but whence the notion that they’ll misuse it? In what way might they use their information that harms you?