this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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me_irl
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Here in Germany, there's a law to prevent tax fraud, which results in companies always creating a receipt for every purchase. Even if you don't want a receipt, they print it and then directly throw it away. (I don't know, if the law is dumb or the companies are).
And yeah, it's resulted in me just always taking the receipt and then usually throwing it away at home.
Taiwan had the same concern. What they did is make it so that receipts also work as lottery tickets, to encourage people to ask for them and hold on to them.
Excuse me what? A lottery ticket‽
Not from Taiwan, but the way it works is that there's a unique ID on each of the receipts. The ID is there anyways, so no additional things to be done at this point. What's different is that a lucky ID is announced e.g. every month, and the person with the receipt can collect a small amount of money.
In case someone else also wants to know more about this lottery:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Invoice_lottery
Big brain.
Reminds me, I think economists love VAT so if this were a global thing for every transaction and we could agree internationally on minimum tax rates, I think society would be better funded (but I’m def not an economist)