London based design studio Berg, teamed with Dentsu London to consider receipts as applications. From their description:

We’ve added semi-useful info-visualisation of the foods ordered based on “what the till knows” – sparklines, trends – and low-tech personalisation of information that might be useful to regulars. Customers can select events or news stories they are interested in by ticking a check box.

We think the humble receipt could be something like a paper “app” and be valuable in small and playful ways.

I really like the large font and graphical elements in the receipt. I also like the idea of giving the customer more information about his/her purchase than just the items, quantities, and total price. It’s all information that could easily be available if the register was a bit smarter and hooked into an inventory system. It seems unlikely that a restaurant would bother keeping an inventory of finished goods instead of just eyeballing it, but I could see the calorie information being included given than it’s already on menus. The ability to personalize the receipt is interesting, since it also implies the ability to track all purchases from a particular customer. Loyalty programs / differential pricing come to mind.

All in all, it reminds me a bit of Square’s receipts , how they include a map indicating the location of the purchase. The map isn’t exactly eye candy. Since the receipts are emailed to you, you could find out if your card is being used by someone else. Of course, you’d have to have already registered that card with Square, and be lucky enough to have the card used by a Square using merchant, but you get the idea.