I have a confession to make: I love shopping at CVS. My love for shopping at CVS stems from my insatiable desire to hunt down bargains on things I have to buy anyway (and yes, some things I don’t).
I am a proud ExtraCare card carrier, and have always gotten a little thrill every time the cash register emits my receipt with multiple coupons. Those long streams of paper meant even more savings were possible, and they were personalized just for me. But it started getting comical, and sometimes even embarrassing, as I stood at the register waiting for the cashier to puuuuulll and then fold, fold and fold the seemingly endless ribbon.
Wow, that’s a lot of paper.
It turns out there has been a longstanding public campaign criticizing CVS’ and other retailers’ lengthy receipts. The Wall Street Journal’s 2009 article reported on the trend of stores tacking “coupons, return policies, loyalty points and other bits of information and advertising onto narrow pieces of paper that are supposed to be a record of what you bought and how much you paid.” The public discourse on this issue has grown to include the Facebook pages, One Million Strong Against Unnecessarily Long CVS Receipts and My CVS Receipt Is Taller than Me, and a parody Twitter account, CVS Receipt. And back in August, TODAY‘s ever-glib Matt Lauer commented, “I understand the need for coupons, but we’re supposed to try to move to a paperless society.”
So it was no big surprise when a post from CVS’ CMO Rob Price appeared on Facebook acknowledging the criticism about the length of the receipts. Price poked fun at his own company – “We’ve gone LONG on savings. And, as you’ve noticed, our receipts have gotten lengthier too” – and vowed to take action, while still driving home the point that, hey, CVS generates those long receipts because they REALLY want everyone to save money!
On the face of it, it seems to be a good PR move. However, Price saying “over the past few days we’ve been listening to you” wasn’t the best choice of words to show exactly how often CVS listens to its customers. Plus, his explanation of how CVS will fix the problem seems fuzzy. (I already tried the option to “send savings to your card” but it didn’t work.) And his snarky suggestion to “please don’t forget to recycle!” all of those reams of receipts didn’t help matters. All that’s missing from his message is a little winky-face emoticon.
I’ll be interested to see how this plays out over the coming months. In the meantime, I have some coupons to use.