[continuation from Shopping as the ultimate experience]

Her answer boggled me for days. It was not its unpredictability that kept haunting me, but the involuntary shift of perspective from the visible side of substantial economical and social exchanges to the very bottom mirroring of it. My attention had been inevitably drawn to the daily disposable transfers and transactions which, even though considered insignificant, contribute to the creation of a globally‐scaled web of intricate interrelations that shape the future in all possible ways. For until up to that moment I had completely failed to recognize the receipt: this confined piece of slippery paper, its parallel existence and importance, its self‐contained complicity in the functioning of the world as a whole, and in maintaining an undisturbed, fair stream of day‐to‐day occurrences and habits. (This sudden acknowledgment also made me recall a particular Sunday evening in Leuven when I unintentionally tore to pieces the only possible way we could recover our luggage from the train station locker: a faintly printed rectangle, the size of a wallet photo, containing a mysterious pattern produced by applying law of attraction principles to thin and chubby vertical lines. The unlimited patience and effort invested in creating a faithful reconstruction of the original—using only stationary tape and glue—reliable enough to fool the machine! The mad emotions and ridiculous thoughts whirling in and out on the way to the train station, the pure joy of seeing the metallic door of the locker opening in front of our eyes!)

Something had to change; this cascade of meaningful events revolving around the receipt marked a point of no return from my previously detached, overconfident attitude, stuck for years in a financially‐based system malfunctioning on reimbursement, tax deduction and product replacement prescriptions. There was only one possible way of doing it right: by appointing myself the daring task of uncovering the secret life of the receipt.