Nordstrom’s gives you the option now of having an emailed receipt rather than a paper one, and links it to your credit card number so you only have to give them the address once. The first time we used my wife’s credit card to do this we were shopping together and just gave them my e-mail, because “clap clap, like applause twice” is a lot harder to get wrong than my wife’s multisyllabic first, middle, and last names in a row, and also we no longer recognize divisions between ourselves as individuals. Anyway, yesterday she was out shopping without me, and in the middle of straining the sauce for the pot roast I got an e-mail from Nordstrom’s with a list of the things she’d bought. Oh good, I thought, she found some boots.
We now live in a world where, despite not being in the same place, I find out my wife has done something not only without her telling me but without any active effort on her part – or on my part. I didn’t check the bank records, or ask to know. I was just told automatically. It’s like having a Google alert for “Rachel was successful at shopping,” which is to say a Google alert for something that happens in the real world and doesn’t involve the internet at all.
This would make my wife extremely uncomfortable, at first.