Not sure there is a joke in there. For some reason the question kind of surprises you and you have to quickly decide on the spot whether to have the receipt or not. So you end up winging it, sometimes having it, sometimes not.
Nowadays, I mostly decline but on occasion still end up agreeing, so I can relate.
In the US, you often get a choice (via the PoS terminal or via the person at the register) if you’d like your receipt. Whether it’s printed automatically without asking you is in and of itself arbitrary and not even consistent within a single type of business, and there are often several options (“No receipt”, “Print”, “Email”, “Print and Email”). Even if it’s printed mandatorily, cashiers will often ask if you want a receipt and toss it if you don’t. Finally, different PoS terminals have different interfaces for this sort of thing. So it’s generally not at the forefront of your mind, it’s not really standardized, and you need to quickly weigh a bunch of factors as to whether you want the receipt and often in what format, so the poster here is joking about how extremely arbitrary their answers are since it usually doesn’t make that big of a difference which you pick.
ok I get it now, and yea European ahahaah
but we do have these things here too, I just did not realize that was much of a troubling question. My time of thumb is purely ecological: I prefer not having it. I’d prefer by mail if that’s not possible and paper is only kept if there is a debt involved
