I try not to look in my filing cabinet at home if I can help it. Why? Because the very first thing I see is a folder full of receipts! Every so often, I sit down to go through them. As I’m figuring out what I need to keep and what I can toss, I’m always shocked at how many I’ve kept. The worst part is that they take up so much space in my files!

That’s why I was excited to see this article about digital receipts in The New York Times last month. According to the article, lots of popular stores, such as Gap, Sears, and Kmart, have started offering paperless receipt options. When you make a purchase in many of these stores, a sales associate can simply e-mail your receipt to you or upload it to a secure website. The article reports that more retailers are pursuing paperless options, so I can see this becoming a standard process somewhere along the line.

All it takes is one glance in my receipts folder to know that I am one of the consumers who would benefit from digital receipts. Not only does it mean that I would have fewer annoying little slips of paper to organize and inevitably throw out every few months, but it’s environmentally friendly. Plus, having receipts e-mailed to me would help me stay organized. I could categorize digital receipts by folder in my e-mail account, so I’m not left searching through piles of crumpled papers for one specific receipt. And when I need to purge? All I would have to do is delete the receipts from my account—much less time-consuming than my current process!

What do you think about this trend? Are you as geekily excited as I am about it?