Why Do We Still Print Receipts? (RANT)

Yes­ter­day I had to stop by Home Depot to pick up a part for my refrig­er­a­tor. I bought one item and received nearly 36 inches of receipt!  A large por­tion was the logo, the phone num­ber and address fol­lowed by a  line of aster­isks, the actual trans­ac­tion and a huge sec­tion ded­i­cated to a sur­vey. Why do I need so much paper for a sin­gle trans­ac­tion. A receipt should serve as proof of pur­chase why do we need all this extra stuff? It’s both waste­ful and unneeded in this age of tech­nol­ogy. Now I am not a tree-hugger but I am a Chris­t­ian and as a Chris­t­ian I feel that we should be a respon­si­ble stew­ard of God’s cre­ation. I don’t think cut­ting down a small for­est to print a sinle receipt is being a good stew­ard. Sec­ondly why are we still deal­ing with paper. Why can that infor­ma­tion not be stored dig­i­tally pos­si­bly by my bank or credit card com­pany? This should not be that hard to do! At the very least allow me to opt out of get­ting a receipt. I don’t mean the cashier throws away the printed receipt but never print the receipt at all. I just hate to see such waste when the tech­nol­ogy exists to fix the problem!