Local — A retail establishment operating under the name Meridian Goods & Provisions has reportedly implemented a pricing architecture designed to guarantee a fixed profit on every item sold by fully externalizing tax impact to customers, an approach management describes as “structurally neutral” and which its own receipts describe, in small print beneath the subtotal, as “Tax Neutrality Extraction.”
The store, a mid-sized general retailer located in a strip mall between a regional credit union and a nail salon whose signage has not been updated since 2011, has become a minor case study among economists, municipal tax officials, and three separate working groups at the National Bureau of Economic Research following an unusually candid statement from its ownership regarding the relationship between corporate margin and public revenue.
The statement, delivered to a local reporter over the course of a twenty-minute interview conducted beside a display of seasonal hand soap, has since been reproduced on enough Bloomberg terminals to qualify, by one analyst’s estimation, as “the clearest articulation of tax incidence theory ever produced by someone who has not read the literature on tax incidence theory.”
The operative principle, according to management:
“We get what we need. Taxes are… your experience.”
The quote has been described by three separate public finance professors as “the first honest thing anyone in retail has said about tax policy in forty years.”
The Model
Under the system, which management refers to in internal documents as the “Tax Neutrality Extraction Model” and in public-facing materials as “our approach to honest pricing,” the relationship between cost, profit, and tax has been formalized into a three-component equation posted on a laminated sheet next to the register.
The structure is reportedly as follows:
base price = guaranteed profit + cost
taxes = added entirely on top
margin compression = not permitted under any circumstances
The store, in other words, adjusts its pricing so that its profit remains unaffected by tax structures. If the local sales tax rises, the price on the shelf does not change. If the local sales tax falls, the price on the shelf does not change. Only the number printed at the bottom of the receipt changes, and that number, management is careful to note, is not the store’s number.
“The tax is not our product,” a representative explained. “The product is our product. The tax is what the jurisdiction does to the product after we have already finished pricing it.”
This framing — which positions taxation as a post-commercial atmospheric condition rather than an input into the business — has generated what Dr. Henry Gutenberg of the Port-au-Prince Institute for Market Dysfunction calls “a rare instance of a firm correctly diagnosing what it has always been doing while simultaneously pretending this diagnosis is a product feature.”
The Guaranteed Profit Envelope
Central to the model is the concept of the “guaranteed profit envelope” — a fixed dollar amount, set per item, which the store has determined represents the minimum acceptable extraction per transaction. Items carry envelopes ranging from $0.43 on a pack of chewing gum to $184.00 on a branded outdoor cooking device that the store has never successfully sold but continues to stock.
The envelope is described, in a placard near the entrance, as “the portion of the transaction reserved for the continued existence of the store.” The placard does not clarify what portion of the transaction is reserved for anyone else, although careful reading of the pricing architecture suggests the answer is none.
The Cost Floor
Beneath the guaranteed profit envelope sits what management calls the “cost floor” — the actual amount the store pays its suppliers, shippers, and utility providers. The cost floor is treated as a sovereign number: it is what it is, and no amount of customer behavior, regulatory change, or macroeconomic shift can cause it to be subsidized by the guaranteed profit envelope above it.
“The floor is the floor,” the representative stated. “The envelope is the envelope. They do not touch. They are not in a relationship.”
The Tax Layer
Above both sits the tax layer, which the store treats not as a component of its pricing but as an external atmospheric condition — comparable, in internal training materials, to weather. The training materials note: “Weather happens to customers. Taxes happen to customers. We do not sell weather. We do not sell taxes.”
The store does, however, display a chart showing sales tax rates across 847 surrounding jurisdictions, presented as a courtesy so that customers can evaluate whether a different zip code would produce a more favorable total on their receipt. Management has clarified that this chart is informational only and does not constitute tax advice.
The Execution
The store’s receipts have been redesigned to reflect the new architecture. Where previous receipts showed only a subtotal and a tax line — the standard itemization required by most state consumer protection laws — the redesigned receipts now display a fully decomposed transactional record intended, according to management, to foster “transactional literacy among the public.”
A typical receipt now includes the following lines, in order:
ITEM COST $3.14
STORE MARGIN (GUARANTEED) $2.86
SUBTOTAL (WHAT WE REQUIRE) $6.00
——————————————————————————————
TAX BURDEN (YOUR CONTRIBUTION) $0.48
TOTAL (WHAT YOU EXPERIENCE) $6.48
The parenthetical clarifications — “what we require” versus “what you experience” — have become the subject of particular academic interest. Three doctoral candidates at the University of Chicago have reportedly built their dissertations around the phrase “what you experience,” which one describes as “the most honest receipt text ever printed.”
Jurisdictional Variability
Customers reportedly see totals that vary significantly based on local tax rates and jurisdictional differences. The same $6.00 subtotal produces a $6.24 total in one zip code, a $6.48 total in another, and a $6.54 total in a third. The store notes, on a separate laminated card, that this variation is “not a pricing inconsistency” but rather “an accurate reflection of the different civic environments in which customers reside.”
A customer who relocated from one county to another during the six-week period studied reported that the price of her preferred brand of paper towels had “gone up by eleven cents,” a statement management describes as factually incorrect. “The price did not change,” the representative clarified. “Her civic environment changed.”
The Variability Disclaimer
Beneath every receipt, printed in a font size that one consumer advocacy group has described as “assertively legible,” the store includes the following disclosure:
Your total may vary based on where you choose to transact. The portion of this total designated as tax is not a product of this store and does not reflect store policy. The store’s portion remains fixed. Questions regarding tax burden should be directed to your elected representatives.
The phrase “where you choose to transact” has been cited by three municipal attorneys as “legally defensible but morally interesting.”
The Claim
Management maintains the approach is transparent, consistent, and — a phrase that appears in their public statement, on their laminated register placard, and in the first sentence of their employee handbook — “mathematically fair.”
The representative, asked to elaborate on what mathematical fairness entails, provided the following:
“We don’t absorb taxes. We acknowledge them.”
The distinction between absorption and acknowledgment has become, in the weeks following the statement, a minor axis of debate among tax policy specialists. The store has clarified, in a subsequent press release, that acknowledgment is the superior posture because it “preserves the informational integrity of the transaction,” whereas absorption “creates the false impression that the store and the state are in a cost-sharing arrangement that does not, in fact, exist.”
Professor Elena Marchetti of the Fletcher School, who reviewed the press release at the request of this publication, noted that the store has, perhaps inadvertently, articulated a position that several generations of tax economists have attempted to convey without success: that the statutory incidence of a tax is almost entirely divorced from its economic incidence, and that businesses have always behaved as though taxes were primarily a customer-facing phenomenon regardless of which party the tax code formally obliges.
“The store did not invent this,” Marchetti observed. “The store printed this. That is a meaningful difference, but it is a difference of disclosure, not of behavior.”
The Transparency Argument
Management has leaned heavily into the transparency framing. A sign near the exit reads: “We are not hiding anything. Other stores hide everything. We are the only store not hiding anything. Ask us about anything.”
Customers who have asked about anything report responses that are, by their account, both technically accurate and structurally unhelpful. One customer, who had inquired whether a rise in the state sales tax would cause her total to increase, was informed that this was correct, and that any dissatisfaction with this arrangement should be communicated to the state. The customer reportedly left without her paper towels.
The Consistency Argument
On consistency, management offers what it calls the “invariance proof” — a printed sheet, laminated and affixed to the pricing architecture placard, demonstrating that over eighteen months of operation under the model, the store’s per-item margin has fluctuated by less than $0.02 across all products, all jurisdictions, all regulatory environments, and one attempted municipal sales tax holiday.
The attempted holiday, which the store honored in a technical sense by not charging sales tax during the designated period, did not produce lower shelf prices. The “tax-free” items carried identical pre-tax pricing to their taxed counterparts. The store clarified that the holiday was “a holiday for the state, not a holiday for the store.”
The Question
Researchers reviewing the model have raised a central issue that the store’s own transparency appears, unintentionally or otherwise, to have made impossible to avoid: who, exactly, benefits from tax policy under this structure?
The traditional account of tax incidence assumes some degree of burden-sharing between buyers and sellers. A sales tax raises prices, reduces seller revenue, and reduces buyer consumption, with the precise split determined by the relative elasticities of supply and demand. The store’s model dispenses with this account entirely.
Under the Tax Neutrality Extraction Model:
- Businesses maintain fixed margins, by design and by placard.
- Customers absorb variability, by default and by receipt.
- Elasticity, as a concept, becomes decorative.
Tax impact, under this arrangement, becomes — as one researcher put it — one-directional. It flows from the jurisdiction, through the store’s unmoved pricing architecture, and into the customer’s total. The store, a previously implicit participant in tax incidence, has declared itself explicitly non-participant and has had this declaration acknowledged by its own register software.
Dr. Henry Gutenberg, whose Port-au-Prince Institute for Market Dysfunction has for over a decade tracked what he terms “the quiet severance of firms from the fiscal state,” describes the store’s model as “not a deviation from ordinary commercial behavior but its most legible expression.”
“The store has not innovated. The store has confessed. The ordinary business of a firm is to treat taxation as an environmental condition inflicted upon its customers. What is unusual is the printing. Once you print it, it becomes difficult to argue that it was ever anything else.”
The Elasticity Problem
Several public finance researchers have pointed out that the store’s model only works in the presence of customers who do not leave. The fixed margin is not, in fact, invariant to customer behavior; it is invariant only to customer behavior that continues to purchase.
The store, asked about this, provided a response that has been described by one analyst as “the most candid statement about consumer sovereignty ever made by a retail establishment.” The representative said: “The model works as long as people shop here. People shop here. The model works.”
This structure — in which a pricing model is justified by the continued willingness of customers to accept its outputs — has been characterized by Gutenberg as “retroactive consent architecture,” wherein the fact of transaction is taken to ratify the terms under which it occurred, regardless of whether those terms were examined, understood, or available for examination prior to purchase.
The Disclosure Paradox
Customer advocacy groups have struggled to articulate objections to the model, given that the store has, by any reasonable standard, disclosed more about its pricing architecture than virtually any comparable retailer. The store’s receipts are more informative than the receipts of its competitors. Its signage is more explicit. Its representatives are more forthcoming.
“The problem,” one advocate noted, “is that the store has told us exactly what is happening, and what is happening is that we are paying for everything. There is no hidden cost. The cost is extremely visible. That is, somehow, worse.”
This has produced what several commentators have termed the “disclosure paradox” — the observation that a business can satisfy every requirement of transactional transparency while articulating, through that same transparency, an arrangement that customers would almost certainly reject if it were presented as a negotiated proposal rather than a posted reality.
Analyst Perspective
Experts consulted for this piece note that the store’s approach, while unusual in its explicitness, reflects commercial behavior that is neither novel nor isolated. Businesses, across sectors and scales, generally aim to preserve margins. Taxes, across systems and jurisdictions, are frequently passed downstream. Pricing structures, across industries and eras, adapt to protect internal outcomes.
What the store has done is not to invent a new relationship between firms and the state but to document an existing one with unusual clarity. Three analysts interviewed used some version of the phrase “held up a mirror.” Two used the phrase “printed the quiet part.” One said, more directly: “They just wrote it down. That’s all that happened. They wrote it down.”
A senior analyst at a Washington-based public finance institute, who requested anonymity on the grounds that his firm is currently engaged in consulting work for two of the country’s largest retailers, summarized the situation:
“The system didn’t change. It was made visible.”
The observation, which has since been reprinted in at least four economics newsletters and one graduate-level textbook, captures what several observers have described as the genuinely unsettling feature of the store’s model: that its novelty is purely representational. The arithmetic was always the arithmetic. The store simply put the arithmetic on the receipt.
The Margin Preservation Tradition
Analysts note that margin preservation during periods of tax change is a well-documented commercial behavior. When states raise sales taxes, shelf prices typically rise by an amount that approximates or exceeds the tax increase. When states lower sales taxes, shelf prices typically do not fall. These asymmetries have been studied for decades and are considered unremarkable within the public finance literature.
What has been remarkable about the store’s model is not the behavior but the signage. The store has simply printed, on a laminated sheet near the register, a policy that most firms would strongly prefer not to put in writing, and then honored that policy with mechanical consistency across an eighteen-month window.
The Downstream Pass-Through Principle
The broader phenomenon — in which taxes nominally levied on firms are effectively paid by customers through higher prices — is known in the literature as pass-through. Pass-through rates vary by market, product category, and competitive structure, but under many conditions approach or exceed one hundred percent, meaning that a one-dollar tax produces a one-dollar-or-greater price increase for consumers.
The store’s innovation has been to lock pass-through at one hundred percent explicitly, posted, with a laminated proof, and to treat this arrangement as a feature rather than a market outcome. This has been described by one economist as “the institutional equivalent of admitting that you have been doing the thing that everyone already knew you were doing.”
Broader Implication
The model reframes taxation from shared burden — a conceptual inheritance from the period in which firms and households were imagined to jointly constitute a national economy — to customer-facing variable, a line item printed on a receipt below a horizontal rule that separates “what we require” from “what you experience.”
This reframing has implications that extend beyond the retail counter. If taxation is understood not as a claim against the revenue of firms but as an atmospheric condition imposed on consumers by their jurisdiction of residence, then several longstanding features of tax policy begin to look different. Corporate tax policy, under this framework, is not a policy that affects corporations. It is a policy that affects corporations’ customers, through the intermediate mechanism of prices that adjust to preserve corporate margins. The corporation itself is merely a channel.
Gutenberg has described this as “the firm’s gradual departure from the tax base.” Firms, in this account, no longer pay taxes. Firms channel taxes. What is taxed is always, ultimately, the customer — not because the tax code says so, but because the pricing architecture says so, and the pricing architecture is now laminated.
The Civic Variable
Under the new framework, taxation becomes a form of geographic variable — a characteristic of place, like weather or zoning density, which customers navigate as a feature of the landscape rather than participate in as citizens.
The store has, perhaps accidentally, formalized this view. Its chart of tax rates across 847 surrounding jurisdictions is not presented as a political document. It is presented as a weather map. Customers are invited to study the map and make decisions about where to transact based on the climate conditions displayed.
“The store has reduced civic life to a purchasing decision,” Gutenberg observed. “This is not an editorial complaint. This is a structural description. The store has provided the tools for its customers to treat their own jurisdictions as shopping environments. Some of them appear to be using these tools.”
The End of Shared Burden
The phrase “shared burden” has historically functioned as the rhetorical scaffolding for a particular theory of fiscal legitimacy: that citizens and firms together underwrite the operation of the state, and that this shared underwriting creates a form of collective ownership over public outcomes.
The Tax Neutrality Extraction Model, by declaring margin invariance under all tax regimes, dissolves the firm’s side of this arrangement. The burden is no longer shared. The burden is delivered. The store has, in effect, filed a structural objection to the entire shared-burden framework, not through political action but through inventory management.
Three political theorists contacted for this piece declined to comment, citing what one described as “the increasing difficulty of distinguishing commercial practices from constitutional amendments.”
Regulatory Response
The store’s pricing architecture has attracted attention from several state attorneys general, municipal consumer protection offices, and at least one federal working group that was already studying a similar phenomenon in airline ticketing. No formal action has been taken, and several officials have indicated privately that formal action is unlikely.
The difficulty, as one attorney general’s office explained in a non-public memo subsequently obtained by this publication, is that the store has done nothing illegal. It has disclosed its pricing. It has honored its disclosures. It has collected the statutorily required taxes and remitted them in full. It has, by every measurable standard, been more transparent than its competitors.
The memo concludes: “There is no cause of action against clarity.”
The Transparency Defense
Ironically, the store’s very transparency has become its primary regulatory defense. In conversations with state officials, the store’s ownership has reportedly offered to expand disclosure further, volunteering to include on each receipt a breakdown of the specific tax jurisdictions to which collected sales tax is remitted, a calculation of the customer’s lifetime tax contribution to the store’s receipts, and a projected total for the remainder of the fiscal year.
Officials have reportedly declined these offers. “We do not wish to be more informed,” one official told the store, according to a person familiar with the exchange. “We would like for the store to be less informative and more conventional. This would allow us to continue our work.”
The store has declined this request, citing its commitment to “structural honesty.”
The Legislative Difficulty
Proposals to address the underlying phenomenon — rather than the specific store — have stalled in three state legislatures. Draft legislation in one state would have required retailers to absorb a portion of sales tax increases during the first twelve months following enactment; the draft was withdrawn after industry groups pointed out that such a provision would effectively mandate margin compression, a concept that no legislator was prepared to defend on the floor.
“We discovered, during the drafting process, that we do not actually have a framework for requiring businesses to lose money,” one legislative aide explained. “The closest analog is price controls, which no one wants. The tax code assumes businesses will adjust, but does not require them to adjust in any particular direction.”
Customer Behavior
Despite the unusual disclosures, customer behavior at the store has remained, by every available metric, consistent with customer behavior at comparable retailers. Foot traffic has not declined. Average transaction size has not fallen. Customer complaints have not increased above baseline.
A consumer behavior research firm hired by the store to evaluate customer response to the pricing architecture concluded that customers primarily experience the receipts as receipts, the placards as placards, and the charts as charts. The parenthetical clarifications on the receipt — “what we require” versus “what you experience” — are noticed by approximately 2.3% of customers, of whom roughly half laugh.
“The customers do not appear to be upset,” the research firm reported. “They appear to be shopping. They have stated, when asked, that they are aware of the store’s pricing model, and that they continue to shop here because the store is located between a regional credit union and a nail salon whose signage has not been updated since 2011, which is convenient.”
The Convenience Moat
The store’s continued commercial viability, despite the structural honesty of its pricing, has led several analysts to propose what is now being called the “convenience moat” theory — the hypothesis that customer behavior is far less sensitive to pricing architecture than to geographic accessibility, and that a sufficiently convenient location can sustain virtually any pricing philosophy provided the customer does not have to travel meaningfully to escape it.
The store, located on a well-trafficked arterial road with ample parking and a functional air conditioning system, appears to benefit from this moat to an unusual degree. Customers have described the store, in surveys, as “right there,” “pretty easy to get to,” and “fine, mostly.” None of these descriptions reference the pricing architecture.
The Awareness Study
A follow-up survey commissioned by a regional consumer advocacy nonprofit found that 34% of regular customers were aware of the store’s pricing model, 41% were unaware but indicated they would not change their behavior if informed, and 25% were unaware and declined to review the information when offered. A single respondent, upon learning of the architecture, expressed admiration. None expressed outrage.
“The honest answer,” one respondent noted, “is that I’m not sure other stores are doing anything different. They’re just not telling me about it.”
This response — which the advocacy nonprofit included in its public report without further commentary — has since been characterized by Gutenberg as “the single most devastating critique of the entire retail sector ever issued by a person standing in a parking lot.”
Competitor Response
Regional competitors have issued public statements distancing themselves from the store’s pricing architecture while declining to specify how their own architectures differ. A statement from a major chain retailer with a location four miles from the store noted that “our prices reflect a variety of factors, including cost, market conditions, and competitive dynamics,” a formulation that public finance professors have observed is consistent with the store’s model while being less specific about it.
A second retailer, asked whether it also maintained fixed margins across tax regimes, declined to comment. A third retailer, asked the same question, responded with a statement emphasizing its commitment to “competitive pricing for the communities we serve.” A fourth retailer simply did not respond, which several analysts have described as the most informative response in the sample.
The Industry’s Quiet Concern
Behind the scenes, industry trade associations have reportedly expressed concern that the store’s model, if widely adopted or publicized, would force other retailers to either defend similar practices or claim meaningful differences that may prove difficult to document. A memo circulated within one trade group — subsequently leaked to a trade publication — described the store as “a disclosure contagion risk” and recommended that member firms avoid any public engagement that might invite comparison.
“The concern,” one trade association consultant explained, “is not that the store is doing something unusual. The concern is that the store is describing what everyone is doing. This is bad for everyone who was hoping not to describe it.”
Academic Reception
Within academic public finance, the store has become something of a cult curiosity. At least two papers currently in peer review reference the store’s laminated placard as a primary source, citing it in the same format as federal tax code provisions. A working paper from an institute at the University of Minnesota includes the phrase “what you experience” in its title.
A joint symposium hosted by three economics departments in the spring featured a two-hour panel titled “The Store: Incidence, Disclosure, and the End of Shared Burden.” Attendance exceeded capacity. Panelists included tax economists, consumer behavior researchers, a philosophy professor, and, via pre-recorded video, the store’s representative, who appeared in front of a display of hand soap and spoke for eleven minutes.
The representative’s remarks, which have since been transcribed and circulated among public finance graduate students, concluded with a passage that several professors have identified as the clearest articulation of the store’s philosophy ever offered publicly:
“We did not change the arrangement. The arrangement was already the arrangement. We changed the receipt. A different receipt is not a different world, but it is a different receipt, and that is the product we were in a position to offer. We sell items. We also, now, sell a receipt that tells the truth about the items. The receipt is free. The items are priced as described.”
The transcript, printed in the program for the following year’s symposium, is accompanied by a note from the editors indicating that the representative declined an invitation to appear in person, citing “operational responsibilities at the store,” which the editors noted may or may not have referred to actual retail operations.
Gutenberg’s Assessment
Dr. Henry Gutenberg, whose institute has been tracking the story since its first local coverage, offered what has been described by colleagues as his most compressed analysis of the phenomenon to date:
“The store is not a deviation. The store is a demonstration. The rest of the sector continues to operate on identical principles and differs only in its willingness to put them on a laminated sheet. When historians of commerce examine this period, they will not write about the store. They will write about the sheet. The sheet is the event.”
Gutenberg has elsewhere characterized the broader movement toward transparent extraction — of which the store represents an early and unusually legible example — as “the final stage of the firm’s relationship with the public: complete disclosure of arrangements that no one is in a position to renegotiate.”
Closing Statement
The store plans to expand the model. Management has announced the opening of two additional locations, to be operated under identical pricing architecture, with identical laminated placards and identical receipts. The new locations will be situated in jurisdictions with substantially different sales tax rates, producing, management notes, “a natural experiment in jurisdictional customer experience” that the store has offered to share with interested researchers.
Asked whether the model might eventually require modification in response to regulatory, competitive, or reputational pressure, the representative provided a response that has become, in the weeks since it was published, something of a coda for the entire phenomenon:
“It works.”
The two-word statement, delivered with what the reporter present described as “unaffected certainty,” captures the core proposition of the store’s model more efficiently than any of its placards, disclosures, or laminated proofs. The system functions. The margins hold. The customers return. The receipts print. The taxes, whatever they are, are added on top.
At press time, customers continued purchasing.
Totals… adjusted.
Profit… preserved.
The store’s Tax Neutrality Extraction Model is not an innovation. It is a confession — laminated, posted near the register, and honored with mechanical consistency. What distinguishes the store from its competitors is not its pricing behavior, which is unremarkable, but its willingness to print that behavior on the receipt in a font size that an advocacy group has described as assertively legible.
The deeper observation is not about one retailer in one strip mall. It is about what happens when the implicit commercial contract — that firms and households jointly underwrite the operation of the state — is severed by inventory management. Under the store’s model, taxation is not a shared obligation but an atmospheric condition imposed on customers by their jurisdiction of residence. The firm is not a co-participant in fiscal life. The firm is a channel that routes tax to the customer, unmodified, with an itemized explanation.
That this arrangement provokes no regulatory response, no meaningful customer defection, and no sustained competitive disadvantage tells us less about the store than about the environment in which it operates. The store is not getting away with something. The store is describing what the rest of the sector is also doing, and asking whether anyone would like to discuss it. No one would.
Editor’s note: Following publication of the store’s laminated architecture, two state legislatures opened informal inquiries and one trade association issued a memo instructing its members not to comment. A doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, whose dissertation now centers on the phrase “what you experience,” reports that her defense committee has requested she include a chapter on whether the store’s receipts constitute political speech. The store declined to weigh in, noting that it sells items, not speech. Its representative, asked for a final comment, offered the phrase “we’re open until nine,” which three separate commentators have since described as the most structurally honest statement about retail ever recorded.
¹ Meridian Goods & Provisions and its Tax Neutrality Extraction Model are fictional, though the underlying behaviors — margin preservation under tax change, near-total sales tax pass-through to consumers, and industry-wide reluctance to discuss either — are well documented in the public finance literature.
² Pass-through rates in excess of 100% have been empirically observed across multiple retail categories and are not typically characterized by participating firms in their marketing materials.
³ The figure of 847 surrounding jurisdictions reflects the store’s laminated chart and is consistent with the density of overlapping sales tax authorities present in many U.S. metropolitan regions.
⁴ Dr. Henry Gutenberg and the Port-au-Prince Institute for Market Dysfunction are recurring editorial constructs of this publication. His assessments, however, are drawn from positions that working economists hold in private and decline to hold in public.
⁵ The phrase “what you experience,” in the store’s receipt context, is believed by this publication to be the most accurate description of the modern consumer’s relationship to the tax code ever printed on thermal paper.