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In a lot of transactions straws are handed out regardless of the customer's desire - ditto for plastic cutlery with takeout/delivery.

For individual businesses the math is against conservatism. Failing to deliver cutlery and getting massive complaints (especially if they lead to politically charged boycotts) is the second most expensive option - the most expensive option is forcing customers to state their preference (and baked in preferences like those submitted by UberEats are small check boxes that users don't see and so restaurants often ignore). The cheapest option is probably just to put a straw jar somewhere on the counter, but then you'll tend to get complaints from employees/franchise owners about theft - while that theft is rare and inexpensive, it is very visible.



>handed out regardless of the customer’s desire

This, but for paper receipts! It blows my mind that the default everywhere I go is to print a receipt, then ask me if I want it. I never do. I am not expensing these two slices of pizza. I will not need to deduct this bottle of shampoo when I file my taxes.

And then the merchant prints a receipt for themself! As if the computer that printed the receipt couldn’t just save a record of the purchase to a database!

The miles and miles of receipts that probably get printed and then thrown away probably adds up to something nontrivial, it’d be such an easy win to only print receipts on request.


That's becoming pretty normal in my experience. A lot of places ask first if I want a receipt. And they're not just printing them anyway and keeping them or throwing them away, they just tell the POS system not to print it at all.

IMO the best reason to avoid receipts when you don't need them is because thermal paper is really nasty stuff.


I live in the 3rd biggest food delivery market in absolute terms, with the per capita size being bigger than the top 2. Here UberEats is not a thing and one local player has the majority market share.

> the most expensive option is forcing customers to state their preference (and baked in preferences like those submitted by UberEats are small check boxes that users don't see and so restaurants often ignore)

Every significant player in the food delivery market here has their app work the exact same way: there is a clear, big checkbox for "I don't need cutlery". It's impossible to miss if you've used the app more than once, I'm sure people missed it the very first week it was introduced but now it's standard, everyone knows about it. Check the box? Restaurants don't send cutlery. Simple as that. Want to hear something even crazier? I'm pretty sure the checkbox is checked by default, so if you don't uncheck it, you don't get cutlery (not 100% sure because it may just default to whatever you chose on your last order).

This is just not a problem whatsoever. I'm sure by now it has already saved millions of pieces of plastic.




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