There is a very similar situation in Germany. The reason behind this is that you can use older POS systems for tax fraud (I never fully understood the details), which apparently was quite a thing amongst smaller businesses. The tax authorities then demanded a perfect chain of paper records (apparently the paper recipe contains some kind of a reference to earlier transactions). Bizarrely, they actually asked customers to keep these receipts which pretty much no one really did, but it was a public topic for a couple of weeks.

German source:

https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/FAQ/2020-0...

"It uses blockchain" eyeroll

On old POS systems you can just roll back the transactions and put the cash in your pocket, as if it never happened…

In Italy, that’s law because there used to be/is (don’t know which is true) a culture where, some/many cafes and restaurants let some/many visitors pay ‘under the table’, dodging VAT taxes.

That law requires shipowners to give a receipt and customers to keep it. Customers can be fined if, a few meters outside the shop, a policeman asks them to show their receipt, and the policeman has evidence they bought something or some service (https://www.accountingbolla.com/blog/sales-tax-in-italy-iva)

In Poland the tax office clerks just go shopping and if they are not offered a receipt, the store will be heavily fined. The customer is not liable, but the shop is, so pretty much everyone will offer you a receipt immediately.

I’m not really familiar with the matter but this year they started requiring immediate reporting from the POS as far as I know. That should tell you how serious they are about receipts in Italy (because there is/was widespread fraud.)

This is the same on Germany, maybe it's an EU thing

It's the law