An Asda customer has gone to bizarre lengths to get himself in the mood for Christmas – by spending more than two hours in store to make his till receipt appear like a Christmas tree.
The shopper picked up 13 festive items including turkey, tinsel, mince pies and goose fat, before making sure they were scanned in an order that would create the look of the tree and its basket. Scanning items with short names first – ham and nuts – he continued with increasingly lengthy named goods to mimic the tree widening.
Alongside a snap of his receipt shared to Reddit, the shopper admitted in response to suggestions he has too much time on his hands, saying: “I’m currently unemployed. Well, technically freelance but a freelance person with no work is unemployed and that’s me.”
A Reddit user queried: “Why did you only make half a tree? You need to do another one with prices.” It prompted the original poster to explain that it’s likely to be impossible. “And position the receipts next to each other?” he pondered. “Just thinking about this for a moment, it would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. Do Asda even sell something that costs 5 figures?”
Another person was intrigued by what inspired him to carry out the task, asking: “How did you become inspired to achieve this? Did the idea come to you in a dream or were you inspired by a folk tale? Keep up the good work.” The shopper explained: “The actual inspiration was once when a guy in front of me at Tesco left his receipt on the till and it was for two bottles of hair gel and a newspaper.”
He continued: “For some reason that made me laugh and I realised that you could tell a story via the medium of receipts. This idea has been on the back burner for years but I was recently made redundant and have more time on my hands. The actual inspiration for this piece (Christmas Tree) came when I was writing notes on my phone and I realised you could form a Christmas tree with words.”
Others were impressed by his endeavours, meanwhile, with one Reddit user declaring: “You should frame this, probably gotta find a way to prevent the ink fading though.” A second agreed: “Brilliant! Well worth taking the time to do this.” Whilst a third gushed: “This is the most wonderful joyful thing. Excellent commitment to the cause. 10/10, you deserve a very happy Christmas for this.”
The shopper was also forced to respond to questions on how the task took two hours, despite the shopping list only containing 13 items. “Because when you buy an item i.e. turkey it doesn’t always come up on the receipt as ‘turkey’,” he explained. “When I scanned the first bits of turkey it came up as ‘cooked meats’.
“If there was a way to see what was going to be printed on the receipt before I actually bought the stuff it would make this project much easier. Alas, I’ve tried the various scan as you shop devices and they don’t match up perfectly with what’s on the receipt. To be fair to ASDA, the words that come up on the self service checkout do. Most others don’t. In the future, if I ever do this again, I might take my whole shop to the checkout, scan it and then ask for it all to be cancelled and start again.”