S’porean ‘Edits’ McDonald’s Receipt To Reduce Paper Usage & Manages To Halve Its Length

Singaporean Tweaks McDonald’s Receipt Format To Make It More Eco-Friendly

Singaporeans who patronise McDonald’s frequently would know that their receipts can be rather long.

If you’re unaware, here’s what it looks like.

A lengthy receipt for a simple Vanilla Cone order
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Recently, McDonald’s lover Mr Ong, who also loves the environment tried to find out how much paper McDonald’s could potentially save if they changed the formatting of their receipts.

He shared his findings in a Facebook post on Tuesday (23 Jul).

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In short, he managed to halve the amount of paper used by simply ‘reformatting’ the receipt.

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McDonald’s receipts are like parchments

According to the post, Mr Ong has long found McDonald’s receipt – which he referred to as “parchments” – to be perplexing.

He shared that despite ordering a single item, he would receive a rather lengthy receipt — from both over-the-counter and automated kiosk orders.

So he began thinking — could we save paper, and the environment accordingly, by making amendments to the design of the receipts?

And that’s what started his little D-I-Y project.

Trimming receipt’s content

Mr Ong started with a receipt that measured about 32cm in length and 8cm in width.

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From there, he:

• Trimmed the headers
• Reworked some of the paragraphing
• Did away with “unnecessary” spacing between lines
• Removed the section of the receipt that says it is a cashless transaction

Lastly, Mr Ong cut off the bottom part of the receipt, which showed an advertisement. Mr Ong, however, conceded that it could be a strategic choice for McDonald’s to have it there.

Here’s a picture showing the transformation of the receipt.

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After finishing his project, Mr Ong claims the ‘new’ receipt only uses half the paper length of the original receipt.

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Mr Ong hopes that McDonald’s Singapore could make similar changes to their receipts to make consumers’ transaction a little more “environmentally friendly and guilt-free”.

Reducing environmental impact of our daily activities

We are heartened that Singaporeans are actively thinking of ways to reduce the environmental impact of their daily activities.

Recent initiatives aimed at reducing plastic straw usage are great, but perhaps multinational corporations can next consider redesigning their receipts to make customers’ transactions more environmentally friendly.

We’ve reached out to McDonald’s Singapore for comments on Mr Ong’s project.

Featured image from Facebook.