Interviews with 34 checkout staff find their own words for handing back a receipt outperform the printed survey-code instruction, and the University is drafting a single script from the best of them.
A nine-week interview study finds shoppers scan a prize-draw code far more often when a checkout worker uses their own words for the moment, not the till's.
Every receipt printed at a participating checkout carries an identical six-word invitation to scan a prize-draw survey code. Almost none of the staff handing that receipt back say those six words aloud. A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities set out to find what they say instead, and how well it works.
Over nine weeks, Hedvig Anyanwu interviewed 34 checkout staff across four supermarkets and eleven strip-mall traders, coding the phrases each had quietly invented for the hand-back moment. Scan-rate under a staff-coined phrase ran well ahead of the printed script read verbatim — a gap the poster reports without attempting to close it in the staff’s favour.
A phrase somebody made up on a Tuesday afternoon outperforming twelve months of copywriting is not a comfortable finding for anyone who signed off on the copywriting.
— Ms Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
“The variation itself is the interesting part,” said Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer. “A script travels; a kindness someone means doesn’t always survive being written down.”
The University’s Office of Research Outputs has welcomed the finding as an opportunity to standardise, and is now drafting a single Receipt Engagement Script from the five best-performing phrases for issue to every partner outlet.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xjkdgp.