The Hidden Cost of Receipts – And How Epson Helps Businesses Save
Every day, millions of receipts are printed in stores and restaurants. Receipt printing may seem insignificant — just slips of paper moving from clerk to customer — but the cost is very significant. Receipt printing represents hundreds of millions of dollars in annual spend, mountains of paper waste, and hours of lost productivity.
For retailers and hospitality businesses looking to save money while also advancing sustainability initiatives, Epson offers high-performing receipt printers designed to use reduce paper usage. With its easy-to-use Paper Savings Estimator tool and patented Advanced Paper Savings technology, Epson is making it easier than ever for businesses to see just how much they could save by optimizing receipt printing.
Why You Should Assess How You Print Receipts
It’s easy to underestimate the true cost of printed receipts. In 2025 alone, U.S. businesses are projected to spend more than $540 million on receipt paper. Now factor in storage, logistics, and time spent replacing receipt rolls, and the expense becomes even greater. On a national scale, Americans use an estimated 620 million pounds of receipt paper every year — an enormous figure for something most customers discard within minutes of receiving it.
For businesses with hundreds or thousands of registers, this is more than a supply-line issue; it’s a direct hit to operating margins. But the good news is that nearly half of this paper use can be avoided with the right technology.
How Epson Cuts Receipt Waste Without Compromise
Condensing receipt information to save valuable paper space can create more problems than they solve — especially when they shrink logos to the point of being unreadable, compress text until it becomes illegible, or prevent barcodes from being scanned. Epson takes an innovative approach—it’s Advanced Paper Savings feature, available across Epson point-of-sale printers, trims receipts intelligently without affecting usability or brand clarity.
How Epson receipt printers reduce paper waste:
- Margin Optimization: Reduces empty space at the top and bottom of each receipt.
- White Line Reduction: Detects and removes unnecessary blank areas between sections.
- Line Spacing Control: Slightly condenses the spacing between lines of text while keeping everything legible.
- Typeface Adjustments: Uses subtle font size changes to take up less space without hurting readability.
- Barcode Height Reduction: Decreases barcode height while ensuring scanners still capture it accurately.
Epson printer technology can reduce paper usage by up to 49%, helping businesses save money and reduce waste — without compromising performance or presentation.1
Free Paper-Saving Estimator Calculator
To help businesses quantify the opportunity, Epson has launched an online Paper Savings Estimator. This interactive tool allows retailers and hospitality operators to input information including average receipt length, printing volume (receipts per day), total number of printers used, and cost per roll. The estimator will calculate an estimated amount of paper and money that a business could save using Epson’s Advanced Paper Savings feature.
For example, a fleet of just 5,000 printers printing 100 standard 12-inch receipts per day could burn through over $1 million in receipt rolls and nearly 1 million rolls annually. Epson’s estimator helps visualize how quickly those costs add up — and how much businesses stand to recover by making receipts shorter and smarter.
Savings That Scale
Even at the store level, the math is meaningful. A single receipt printer can consume more than $200 worth of paper per year. Across a chain with thousands of printers, trimming receipt length could mean millions of dollars in savings annually. That’s before considering the reduced labor of swapping fewer rolls and the sustainability benefits of using less paper overall.
The Smart Choice for Modern Retail
One of Epson’s latest solutions, the OmniLink™ TM-m50II, showcases these features in a compact, modern design that’s easy to integrate into fast-paced retail or hospitality environments. Supporting multiple connectivity options, from USB and Serial to Ethernet and wireless, it delivers flexibility alongside Epson’s proven paper-saving tools.
By combining powerful hardware with intelligent software, Epson helps businesses do more than print receipts — it helps them reclaim budget, streamline operations, and meet their sustainability goals.
Final Takeaway
Receipts may seem like small details in the customer journey, but they represent a big opportunity for operational savings – see how in this infographic. With printers like the OmniLink™ TM-m50II engineered with Epson’s Advanced Paper Savings features and the new Paper Savings Estimator, businesses can see exactly how much they’re spending, how much they’re wasting, and how quickly they can turn receipts into a source of efficiency instead of cost.
1Paper-saving feature up to 49% on the TM-T88VII model. Paper-savings percentage varies by model and printer settings. Full paper savings functions are available only for text-based receipts. For image-based receipts only the top and bottom white space reduction is available.
