Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
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PTA/PTOs were onboarding loyal Amazon customers via Amazon Smile because of the fundraising. In the last PTO I was involved with, Smile accounted for about 2% of our donations ($3000/year = ~$150K in household spending from our school).
To put that in perspective, about 90% of our $150K annual fund raise was direct donations from parents and local businesses, AND Amazon's contribution was 3 of the 60 MacBook Airs in the One-to-one laptop program our magnet was funding annually. Maybe we judge "effectiveness" on a different scale than Amazon but we sure appreciated their 5% contribution to that program.
Now these organizations will switch all that customer loyalty to Target Red Card.
My first thought is that if someone can't afford a computer, wouldn't they prefer to have a "lesser" computer and have the remaining difference in cash or necessities?
Maybe the donors are a little out of touch with what their recipients need. I'm sure they are appreciative of the computer, but there could be more impactful use of that money.
Though it feels wasteful (making assumptions about the use-cases) I’m guessing grade school kids need them for the same reasons or non-reasons as mostly everyone else.
That these are coming from a PTO fundraiser and not a tax-funded budget makes it okay in my book (setting aside the reality that other kids might attend schools with much less productive PTOs —a problem I think for a public system).
I would think a Chromebook would be more fit for purpose here though.
“Why do people need xyz” deserves its own form of Betteridges headlines.
https://www.ptotoday.com/pto-today-articles/article/6232-tar...
I only learned about this a few months ago. I saw that I had accrued like 80 "votes" for non-profits. So you can go in there and distribute your votes to applicable non-profits in the area and presumably each vote is worth a fixed amount that is sent to them.
I know very little about the program other than using it as a consumer over the last few months. But hopefully that helps. I don't have the Target Red Card. But I use the app for savings, so I scan the app when I checkout at Target and i've been accruing these votes the whole time without realizing.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/46262...
It is pretty fascinating to read down the list and see what kind of orgs common people chose to donate to.
I wish there was a searchable text version.
This is sad. I am currently at $417.30 in donations to my local charity. Amazon is in denial if they think this hasnt had an impact.
$316.62 to a grade school? Lame.
$100,000 novelty check to a board member’s favorite charity that happens to be run by his son? Now that’s pizzazz with a capital P!
I've seen it happen first hand in similar sized companies.
But I think we can all see this for what it is — belt tightening. Will they increase other philanthropic activities to the tune of what they were previously giving away via Smile? I would be very, very surprised if so.
I suspect this is the time when the charities need smile donations the most.
Seemed like an easy way to cut off affiliates while appearing to be generous. Maybe I'm just too cynical.
A switch in your profile which would default you to smile shouldn't have been such a big problem for a company like Amazon.
The first is about building houses in areas near Amazon offices. The second is training future Amazon employees. The third is delivering food that I'm sure won't use existing Amazon delivery solutions at all. And the fourth is disaster relief, which I'm less cynical about though I am reminded of their recent tornado issue.
What a charitable company.
Similar with their education program, some of it would change but I bet the base project could be seen as a worthwhile investment in the companies future. Saying these acts justify ending smile is silly.
I would have believed that.
People can make donations in their own name and get tax deductions for it, unlike with Smile where Amazon claims the deductions for itself. And why should a giant multinational corporation decide for us a list of eligible donation receivers? Some of those "charities" are very questionable and I doubt the average customer looks much into if what they do with the money even aligns with their own vision of a better world.
But more to your point: I have six committed monthly donors for the PTFA for which I’m treasurer. I have at least a couple dozen individuals signed up for AmazonSmile and Easy Fundraising.
Finally the last part of your comment is so disturbing.
"I doubt the average customer looks much into if what they do with the money even aligns with their own vision of a better world."
Because that would lead to more customer outrage than this? What a ridiculous point we've reached as a society if we can't take clear communication and we give incentives to lie to us.
If that's the supposed reason, I call bullshit. Could've just reduced the number of charities.
Personally I try hard to avoid sending my business to Amazon whenever there's an alternative, and this was one of the good things about them.
It’s a service that fulfils a critical need but is run on a shoestring budget, with very little of the money spent on anything but critical necessities. Although Amazon Smile wasn’t a huge source of income for my branch, it will leave a hole that will have to be filled.
I can’t say I disagree that there aren’t plenty of mega-charities that spent too much on admin and fundraising, but I also know firsthand there are plenty out there deserving of every penny coming their way.
[1] https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/our-organisation...
Just because the charity sausage gets made in ways that isn't always appealing doesn't mean there aren't charities that have impact.
You can be involved in the community and get to know local organizations and how they run, then give to them with more certainty.
In our case, the bulk of our charitable donations goes to organizations we know first hand, which are mainly local. Eg: helping the local preschool, our houses of worship, etc. The most 'remote' org we give to is the Israeli ambulance corps, but we still "know" them in the sense that my wife had been a volunteer EMT there a long time ago.
Point being that - there's some positive synergy between your physical community involvement and your "insight" into how organizations in your community function, and a sense of how the money is spent.
The fact that one of these orgs got something like $400 via Amazon Smile from us last year is nice although let's be real - nobody is going to stop using Amazon because of this change.
There are good charities that do spend 70-99% of their revenues on their cause. And there are high-profile charities that don't.
The nice thing about AmazonSmile is that you could pick from the small ones you know well and trust.
Now, Amazon will donate to the biggest ones without our choice, which is definitely worse.
do you have evidence of this assertion?
This is surprisingly honest for corporatespeak and I think reflects the god-complex which tends to follow people who spend a lot of time taking in billions of dollars.
The reality is there were a lot of charities - maybe even most of them - who were getting donations which were completely incongruent with Amazon’s moral sensibilities.
There’s no law saying they have to let customers pick, and this isn’t worth “outrage”, but I think it’s behavior which signals a lot about the way Amazon’s top leadership has shifted.
Or, a less cynical take is that they really can have more impact by focusing on fewer charities. Another commenter posted Amazon Smile's Form 990 from 2018 [1], the most recent year on Pro Publica's website that has a full listing of all the charities that received funds.
The total PDF is 2121 pages long, and the list of charities starts on page 18. They made about $37.5 million in total donations that year. The top charity, the ASPCA, received $1.8 million that year (note that the ASPCA had total revenue of $267.7 million that year). But the main point is that the charity on the top of the second page, which is only about 100 charities from the top (ordered by total amount received) received just over $10,000, and the charity at the top of the third page received $5659. And there are still over 2100 pages of charities to go!
So it seems imminently reasonable to me that, rather than give a couple hundred bucks a year to thousands and thousands and thousands of charities, to instead consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good.
1. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/46262...
I am highly skeptical of wisdom of utilitarianism in charitable giving. No one has non-toy models so the math is all made up nonsense. More importantly, proximity between the giver and the recipient has profound agency effects that are completely ignored by most utilitarians. You tend to get better outcomes when you allow agents to center their personal projects, even if resources aren't optimally allocated when ignoring this "agent centering effect".
Not "actual worth to society."
A market based, consumer driven approach like Amazon Smile, is likely optimal.
Consumers, on average, are very effective and logical choosers (on average).
Amazon Smile was likely a highly effective program.
Issue is, Amazon now wants to redirect its customer's dollars to improve its reputation.
Internally, employees have begged for literally decades for an employee donation matching program (similar to Microsoft's donation matching) and have been stonewalled for years, with upper leadership not wanting to give a firm answer as to why.
Meanwhile, most of the philanthropic endeavors that Amazon does offer its employees internally are in some way otherwise related to things that Jeff has a fiduciary tie to or where doing so was politically motivated to turn a blind eye to the rapid expansion of the Downtown/SLU Seattle Campus.
It's hard not to be cynical when you look at the charities they are focusing on. All of them are in-house, and seem positioned to strongly benefit Amazon. Like the one where they brag about building houses near the Amazon major headquarters.
Funny sidenote is that my chosen charity was actually ProPublica
Honestly, this seems rather impressive. A lot higher than I thought! That's great! The reason I expected lower is because these tend to follow power laws with a very steep decline. The 200th charity makes more than half what the 100th charity makes is pretty good. I had to go through 19 pages of charities (I counted 126 lines on one page, but I probably miscounted so +/- some) before I started to see them go below $1k. That's quite impressive though, there's over 2k charities getting over $1k
Specifically, where it can most efficiently buy image and influence for Amazon. For profit corporations charitable donations, like any other expenditures of corporate funds, are made to advance the commercial interests of the corporation.
The corporate justification part of amazon smile was in the same effort as any charity in purchase which is to make the consumer feel empowered, righteous and moral for the decision to consume a product. Charity tie ins like rainforest donations or carbon offsets are designed to incense consumers to evangelize. They're designed to eliminate buyers remorse returns and blunt the often ever present reality of sweat shop labor. That anyone got real money from this is just a happy side effect.
This reminds me of a cartoon that shows a field of sheep and a billboard with a wolf captioned "I will eat you", and one of the sheep says admiringly, "He really tells it like it is."
We need less, not more, of this. Ending this program is absolutely wrong, and the wrong is not lessened because they are being honest about their greed.
This is an attempt to recover revenue, nothing more.
I guess with the current economic downturn, Amazon has decided that there is insufficient margin to continue taking a cut out and donating it to charity.
I'm guessing the administrative burden of so many organizations is a big driver behind the shutdown.
Some retail has a 75%+ markup as standard at the store. That's why they're able to regularly offer sales where they take 25%, 50%, even 75% off: it's not just to clear out unsold inventory; many retailers that do this are still making a profit at those prices.
Amazon, being a "sell everything and more" retailer, certainly doesn't get to enjoy those high profit margins for all their products, but they also definitely do not have to deal with the razor-thin margins of other sectors across the board. They get to average it out nicely somewhere in the middle.
Some retail has a 75%+ markup as standard at the store. That's why
they're able to regularly offer sales where they take 25%, 50%,
even 75% off: it's not just to clear out unsold inventory; many
retailers that do this are still making a profit at those prices.
Similarly, clothing often has some ridiculous sticker price, because the entire point of the sticker price is to be marked down in one of the seemingly perpetual sales that retailers have. I remember that J.C. Penney, when they hired Apple head of retail Ron Johnson, tried to change this practice, by setting the list price of clothing closer to the price that they paid, eschewing having sales. It was a disaster [1]. Customers had become accustomed to seeing large markdowns, and when those markdowns weren't there, they waited (or shopped at other retailers which continued to offer markdowns).
Just because the sticker price has a 75% (or 2-300%, in the case of watches) markup doesn't mean the retailer actually expects to make that margin on anything except a small fraction of sales.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/02/24/a...
I would assume this is the case for many users and agree this is likely a short-sighted change. Scary indication of things to come as money policy keeps making companies more frugal.
I particularly like that the email I got addresses me (despite the many tens of thousands of dollars I've spent through Amazon over the past two decades) as lower-case "customer." My default position on the various AWS keynotes about the power of data / personalization is "you first, buddy."
I can’t think of a metric where they aren’t worse than the average retailer.
monopolies are bad, for consumers and for competitors. Even if you build your monopoly "fairly" by inventing a better mousetrap, putting the competition out of business is a reward that that is unfair and does not belong to the owner of the mousetrap. For example, Amazon could be split into 3 smaller Amazon mousetraps that compete with each other. Is that unfair to Jeff Bezos? No, he would own the same percentage of mousetrapping companies as he did before. What he would not own is a monopoly.
The sins of Amazon the monopolistic competitor are worse.
I really do think the expiration is coming up on Amazon too, with the same 15 year run. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the bad guy.
Ironically, small family shops use WAY more child labor, unpaid labor etc as a percentage than Amazon. They also produce more plastic per item, take only cash to evade taxes, etc.
They highlight their charitable programs as a way of justifying the end of the Smile program. But those existed when Smile existed. It’s not a zero sum game as they imply. They took away an avenue customers got value out of, probably disproportionate to the value the charities received frankly, and that’s the end of the story. A sad day for customer obsession.
Sure, people could still call them out on how it's a reduction of what they're donating, but there's a much higher chance the headline reads well for them.
As it is, the underlying symbolic implication is that Amazon is getting rid of its smile and instead.. frowning?
> Announcing "Amazon Frown": Every year we will donate $10 million dollars each to <worst people imaginable> but you can stop us. Select your most hated group and 1% of your purchase amount will be reduced from the donation.
A lot of charities tend to side with one political affiliation or the other. When people see %not their political affiliations% charity, they take it personally, and try to boycott the service. So this might do more harm than good.
If you want to see how much your Amazon Smile account has contributed, there's a web page: https://smile.amazon.com/charity/my-impact
Why do you think that? I get some 2-8% of the purchase amount via their Amazon Affiliate Program. Furthermore, their "Amazon Choice" or whatever it's called where they suggest 1 version of the product over the rest is often made by Amazon itself because they saw that someone else was profiting nicely off of it so they get in between and squash the competition.
Amazon is a pile, mostly.
I always assumed Smile was mostly a way for Amazon to get me to direct that to a charity instead of a stale affiliate link.
I think charities will still get a significant amount from my purchases, since AmazonSmile was only 0.5%, while affiliate links for many categories are 4% or higher.
This doesn't make bullshit any more tolerable. In fact, the blatantly obvious nature of it makes this bullshit more intolerable. It's an insult to the reader. It's an insult to truth. It degrades language by eroding the meaning of words. It harms trust and confidence. All bullshit should always be called out. It should be socially unacceptable to waste bytes and axons on bullshit.
I wonder if that had anything to do with it...
I thought part of what made Smile cool is that Amazon would forward my donations to such a wide range of organizations (eg my local church OR my local satanic temple). Talk about consumer choice.
[1]: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/1997ar/shcontri.html "Shareholder-designated contributions"
[2]: https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/pampered-... "Pampered Chef profits will no longer fund abortions"
What BS is this? Can we have the real reason?
Others have already suggested cutting the list of charities down to a manageable number, perhaps from the list of charities that got the most interest already. I suspect this would end up producing bad PR from their curated list, so they've decided to just pick a handful and be done.
But again, I suspect there was more to this and we'll never know the real reason.
I think based on the Amazon’s statement, which states that it didn’t have the desired impact, they could’ve just rolled it out as the default. The reality is that it’s now 5% back to Amazon and you can trivially calculate that back in missed profits they didn’t get.
Belt tightening or legitimate disappointment with the impact?
now we are seeing lower multiples and attempts to transition to higher margins
I would try to remember to use it, but I also don’t make very many Amazon purchases. My total donation amount through smile is only a few dollars.
But likewise, in a couple of years I've only generated about ten dollars worth and I make at least a couple of purchases a week.
0.5% of net just isn't very much on low priced items.
I can’t currently find anything about it in the app. Either it has already been removed or its very difficult to find.
I am disgusted and repelled that Amazon, a multi-billion dollar conglomerate with seemingly unlimited tax breaks, corporate benefits and exemptions, should abandon the one charitable and genuinely honourable programme it offers; notably that each customer can choose which charities to support, resulting in keeping afloat innumerable small and obscure non-profits, a majority which would otherwise remain unknown and overlooked. A majority of these immeasurably valuable organisations are totally reliant on contributions, grateful for every penny they receive in donations. It is deplorable that Amazon, an obscenely profitable and market-dominating consortium, should abandon what has been the only benevolent and honourable attributes of the company.
To justify this contemptable greed and grossness they have announced that Amazon will instead be donating to prominent chosen (by whom?) charities, no doubt largely high-profile ones that already receive considerable donations and publicity. They are utterly shameless.
'AmazonSmile represents a very small portion of the total charitable contributions made through our other programmes, which we estimate at more than £100 million in 2021.'
Isn't this the point? To reach charities that are overlooked and underfunded? I feel sick......
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-closing...
""" Your total orders The number you see here is the total number of eligible orders you’ve placed at smile.amazon.com on your web browser or with AmazonSmile activated in the Amazon Shopping app on your iOS or Android phone, since the first time you selected a charity at smile.amazon.com.
This total may take several days to update after your order ships.
Look for the AmazonSmile badge in Your Orders to see which of your orders have supported charity. https://smile.amazon.com/charity/my-impact?ref_=nav_cs_smile """
""" Which products on AmazonSmile are eligible for charitable donations? Tens of millions of products on AmazonSmile are eligible for donations. You will see eligible products marked “Eligible for AmazonSmile donation” on their product detail pages. Recurring Subscribe-and-Save purchases and subscription renewals are not currently eligible. https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/about/ref=smi_se_dshb_leli_... """
Smarter for Amazon to pick and choose which charities to spend on so it can virtue signal to the more gullible.
But the continuity of funding is usually better when its from tax not charity. So here we are, amazon withdraws, whats the replacement income stream for the projects being funded?
Amazon did a "good" thing, in the narrow context of spending money for public good. The situation this happens in is not good, and depending on charity rather than having governments fix systemic problems through tax based spending really doesn't solve the problem.
By being able to choose who go the donations, it felt empowering and less likely the company was using charity to pursue secondary interests.
It was something of a psychological hook for me, that a few pennies from each order would go to support content I appreciated. I did mentally kick myself when I forgot to place an order through the smile.amazon.com portal. I’ll probably end up giving a bit more consideration to other online retailers now, although every time I’ve ordered online from Walmart lately has been a complete disaster.
Meanwhile, the smaller nonprofit organizations that have no advertising budget, no payroll, no employee benefits, etc. that run on a shoestring budget will never miss the measly $1000 a year that Amazon Smile generated, right?
If they were serious amount making a significant impact, they would allow for donations to the smaller organizations that spend virtually every dollar on their programs rather than huge salaries and elaborate holiday parties that larger nonprofits can afford.
If you are interested, IRS provides copies of tax returns for many US-based charities. Look at the bigger ones to see where your donations are actually being spent, and the large sums they have in their bank and investment accounts.
The charity I contributed to got the email and won’t be using Amazon as a vendor any longer.
This happens with restaurants where I live, and it happens with tech companies or features or divisions of companies. If your thing isn't getting noticed in the mass media or the social media, then it's unlikely to be as successful as things that are getting noticed. You don't even have to spend money on advertising or PR - as Tesla has shown - you just have to make a name for yourself somehow (not that Tesla is how I would do anything).
Charities that customers care about, not Amazon executives.
The charity I support is the ASPCA, which gets significant funding from Smile and it’s going to translate directly into fewer animals getting care.
Shitty.
So, Amazon's tired of revenue going out instead of coming in....
Sure, the argument can be made that Amazon does let charities join their affiliate program <https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/GYV3PYE...>
But how many of those smaller charities are going to want to deal with all that fine print just to set a 24 hour browser cookie?
Big charities tend to focus on where they can have the most impact. Smaller charities tend to focus on making an impact in a place that needs it.
My current charity work is as as Dev and Technical Consultant for a company that basically helps organizations do online evidence based mentoring and support in both urban and rural communities, using an app they developed. Founded basically by a professor to implement her research, than passed on to a new CEO when it took off. They work with a lot of Big Brothers Big Sisters chapters.
My contract runs out in Feb and I'm not sure what I'm going to do after that, given all the local layoffs. It's not like the stuff I'm working on is at Scale or uses Machine Learning or requires K8 or whatever is going to make some hiring manager's eyes light up now.
Yes, but for small, grass-roots organizations even small sums can be meaningful. For example, my chosen donation was to Last Hope Animal Rescue, a small outfit based on Long Island.
>This is the quarterly notification to inform you that AmazonSmile has made a charitable donation to the charity you’ve selected, Last Hope Inc, in the amount of $854.65 as a result of qualifying purchases made by you and other customers between July 1st - September 30th.
How much does $854 per quarter mean to this small organization? Even if it only helped rescue a few animals, it was meaningful. Now that meager funding stream will, unfortunately, be gone.
1. If you want to support this writer, there are Amazon links at https://dahosek.com/publications/ (click on the book covers).
All I know is that I’m not going to like the charities that Amazon picks, and I will not be participating if I can help it.
This is a massive loss in terms of marketing.
A company is essentially having to make a permanent, immutable financial commitment lest they face backlash.
Yes, Amazon has the money to continue this program. Yes, I think they should keep it around. No, I don't think it makes sense for people to go bonkers over it ending.
I expect cynical HN commenters would make the similarly snarky comments about how X company is only committing to Y time period.
https://twitter.com/EconomyApp/status/1578475690772508672/ph...
Whereas the $3B net profit is real money they can put into their coffers (or share with shareholders).
Edit: now if Rivian goes bankrupt and delists, then yes, at that point Amazon does lose however many $Bs they invested which they will put as a write-off.
I went searching around for options after this change and the things I like seeing about Cultivate is that it both tells me about options to purchase an item on a site that is NOT Amazon, as well as keeping the donation feature.
I really struggle to find an example of something that you can only buy on Amazon, short of relisted aliexpress garbage that you should be avoiding anyway out of safety concerns.
Same reason we use 3$/hour labor to make clothes rather than $30/hour. How much would clothing cost then?
Is it fair to burden the working poor with prohibitively expensive goods to raise wages beyond a market equilibrium level? No, not really. Decades of economic analysis to corroborate this viewpoint.
Though there will always be a winner and a loser with shifts in income. Can be cases where it makes sense to advantage some groups at the expense of another, even if it's less optimal in a total sense
and their pay rates for warehouse workers is high enough that it tends to raise wages in the surrounding areas.
SO WHAT!? Any money is helpful. This is such a BS argument for getting rid of it.
I’m honestly surprised it even lasted so long.
Anyway, there are plenty of alternatives to amazon (that aren’t more expensive or just slightly more expensive) that aren’t as morally bankrupt as amazon is. I’d encourage you to spend your money there instead :)
Having said that, I am sure there are people misusing this and its a burden on Amazon to make sure they are not funding / supporting malicious users. I get it but closing it is not a solution.
..And yeah, also it was (more) annoying to use when you just want to get in and out like it’s a dirty Walgreens. Solid effort though, Amerzon.
https://reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/_/j4znb8y/?...
Rich people don't get rich by giving their money away randomly. For example, if Bill Gates didn't start the Gates Foundation his money would have been highly taxed, and he would have lost control of it. By starting the Gates Foundation he keeps control of that money, and he can use the foundation to steer policy in ways that are beneficial to him.
It’s only weird if you assume all corporations should be amoral money exchange systems where by money is exchanged for labor and capital which in turn is exchanged for more money
almost none of the people that make up a corporation are free to decide where money goes. the few people that do take the money out, the board of directors or whatever, could just donate their own money to whatever charity.
What you’re missing is the final step in the chain, which is the part where profits are distributed to shareholders. If I’m one of those shareholders, I might very well take a large chunk of those dividends and donate the money to charity. But instead of paying me more of those dividends to donate to my preferred cause, the company’s management has decided that they should be the ones donating my money to their preferred cause.
Aside from that, it’s just a failure of specialization. Philanthropy is hard, making money is hard, and building a single organization that does a good job at either of them is even harder. I’d rather have corporations that focused on doing a really good job at whatever they did and non-profits that do whatever they do as efficiently as possible, rather than a corporation trying to do both.
Obligatory Links:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html
https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/14/charity-isnt-about-help...
https://www.amazon.com/The-Elephant-in-Brain-audiobook/dp/B0...
If you think they're not paying enough, I have a simple solution - actually have a Washington state income tax.
> ... wind down AmazonSmile by February 20, 2023
Not really. Amazon is spending more cash on english language TV and movies than Netflix. It's also acquiring it's way into... health care?
All of the things that make money at Amazon are related to the core e-commerce biz (ads, subscriptions, marketplace) or some core competency developed to support e-commerce (AWS). They have no competitive advantage in providing medical care, making movies, or household gadgets.
Big tech is struggling with the idea that their business is maturing and will be less exciting from here. It's a tough pill for hot shot founders/managers to swallow.
I'm assuming they rationally did the math to see if the program was a net contributor to bottom line or not. (That's the sort of rigor i've come to expect from a company like Amazon)
It was neither. It was a way to get people to go directly to Amazon in their browser rather than search items through Google. Clicking through Amazon from Google results gives Google an affiliate commission on those sales.
Is this observation based on knowledge of their motivations or just a deduction?
They 100% did
> nothing more than a PR stunt/tax write off
Do you even know what a tax write off is? PR stunt of course, but that is every single company who also donates to charity. Should we instead shame companies for blatant PR stunts so that they donate $0 instead?
> Should we instead shame companies
Companies obviously exist for profit, but companies at the size of Amazon can take the view that doing good things is genuinely good for business on a level deeper than quick PR (creates company alignment, healthier economy).
PR is a competitive, zero-sum game.
> Should we instead shame…
Yeah. This isn’t a purity test for a company who’s genuinely trying to change things for the better. This is shaming using charity to launder human rights abuses, dishonest business practices, anticompetitive behavior and win favor with politicians.
$400 million in donations to charities and Amazon has the gall to say "the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped."
> We don't want to send smaller amounts of money to a huge amount of charities chosen by users, since some users likely chose charities that we do not support. It also doesn't allow us to print out those huge oversized checks for photo ops. We will continue to give a bare pittance out to a small number of organizations selected for peak public relations points while minimizing cost and maximizing tax write-offs and greasing the right palms to advance our business.
> We are committed to being strategic and efficient with our charitable giving by focusing on a select number of organizations that align with our values and support our business objectives. This approach allows us to make a meaningful impact and gain positive visibility through high-impact initiatives and partnerships. Additionally, it maximizes the benefits of our charitable investments, including cost savings and tax advantages.
According to my account page, I've generated $100.71 for the charity I selected, and, overall, they've received $273.64 as a part of the program. So I guess the charity I selected wasn't all that popular. But I expect other, more mainstream charities, were.
I’m surprised they couldn’t squeeze more out of this program though. With credit cards, I think the points system definitely works to make you feel better about your purchase.
The fact that they're axing this at a time of mass layoffs makes me think they're not telling the truth.
Despite ordering tens of thousands of dollars off the place, I have $1.20 given to some random water charity.