When Matty Benedetto bought a bag of Swedish Fish from a CVS in Burlington, Vermont, recently, he received a receipt that was longer than his arm. While he was not, to be sure, the first to notice that CVS receipts can be lengthy, what Benedetto did next likely was a first.
He returned to his nearby design studio, re-created a high-resolution digital version of his receipt, and then found a rug manufacturer in China that could reproduce it. About three weeks later, the rug arrived, and he unfurled it in his sprawling 6,400-square-foot studio.
“CVS receipts are always way too long,” Benedetto said in a video he posted to his social media accounts. “So I decided to re-create one of my receipts into a rug that stretches 50 feet long.”
As of February 6, the video had garnered 2.8 million views on YouTube, 1.2 million views on TikTok, and more than 184,000 likes on Instagram.
Among the commenters on Instagram was @cvspharmacy, which to @jeffwshih’s comment, “Can’t wait for the CVS scarf,” responded, “It’s a thing 🧣🧣🧣” (It is.)
Also chiming in: the subject of the $3.59 CVS purchase.
“All this for me? 🥺” @swedishfish asked.
Forget meme not: CVS’s long receipts are the meme that keeps on memeing. Know Your Meme tracked the origin back to the 2008 formation of a Facebook group, “One Million Strong Against Unnecessarily Long CVS Receipts.” (It has fallen somewhat shy of its name, having 16 years later accrued 63 members.)
On his eponymous late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel has railed against CVS receipts repeatedly. In 2015, when President Obama was a guest, Kimmel presented him with a long CVS receipt for a Snickers bar and asked what the president could do about it. Obama took a long look at the receipt, then began to tuck it in his pocket. “Actually, 25 cents off batteries,” he deadpanned. “I’ll keep this.”
In 2016, YouTube user Jeremy Schneider dressed up as a 12-foot-long CVS receipt for Halloween, then visited a CVS to buy Halloween candy. The video has received almost 920,000 views.
When then-CVS Health CEO Larry Merlo appeared on CNBC in 2018, host Bertha Coombs unfurled a CVS receipt she’d received for two Kind bars. Merlo, more bemused than defensive, noted she could opt for digital receipts.
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When Retail Brew reached out to CVS about Benedetto’s rug, Carissa Falzarano, a spokesperson, made the same point.
“We offer a digital-first solution for our in-store receipts so that consumers can go paperless if they choose,” Falzarano said in a statement. “Since some consumers prefer paper receipts, we didn’t remove that option completely.”
But wait…there’s more: Benedetto told us he was offered a digital receipt option, but opted for paper because he wanted to use the long receipt as fodder.
“Creating successful content is tapping into relatable moments that a lot of people have,” Benedetto told Retail Brew.
Successful content is, it turns out, Benedetto’s objective. His livelihood, and the name of his YouTube channel, which has 4.69 million subscribers, is Unnecessary Inventions. A former product designer, he invents and makes products that are as amusing as they are preposterous, like a snack bowl with a spinning damp sponge in the center for cleaning Cheetos dust off fingers, a Lego vacuum cleaner that both sucks up Legos and sorts them, and a ceiling fan…for cars.
A generation ago, we might have called it conceptual art, but that’s not how Benedetto described it.
“It’s like the intersection of internet meme culture meets QVC, meets As Seen on TV products, meets Weird Al [Yankovich],” Benedetto told us. “And a little bit of Bill Nye the Science Guy.”