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.
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://www.ptotoday.com/pto-today-articles/article/6232-tar...
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.
The computers cost about 40% of the overall budget. We had enough money to fulfill other aspects of the PTO’s program, PE, Art, Music, Dance, (the ‘A’ in STEAM that LAUSD skipped over) Robotics.
This was a magnet school with widely varied socioeconomic family profiles. And the PTO is not authorized by contract with the school to engage in other social programs. But those in need were covered by a) the Federal hot lunch program, and b) LAUSD-funded anyone on campus child or adult could have a free breakfast (of dubious quality, all carb no protein and for example, a 10% juice sugar-laden drink qualified as ‘fruit’) just for being on campus. Going hungry was by choice only. And you would not believe how much food is thrown away from the breakfast program. My wife fought hard to connect with local homeless shelters to send the food but school administrators put the kibosh on that.
So why should we opt for austerity when we had everything covered? Actual parents will always choose the best option within their reach.
I would think a Chromebook would be more fit for purpose here though.
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).
“Why do people need xyz” deserves its own form of Betteridges headlines.
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.
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.
But these donations are not done purely for altruistic reasons — they're calculated decisions that also help the corporate entity. There's nothing wrong with this, and they'd still be doing good. But it's not the same as letting your customers decide where to donate hundreds of millions of dollars.
I suspect this is the time when the charities need smile donations the most.
Specifically Bezos' bottom line.
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!
> Amazon has helped fund over 20 thousand charities of your choosing. These small charities couldn't have made it without your help.
Facebook adverts picking random local charities and showing how much they've raised is far better, run them on amazon's front page too.
The local hospice I choose has raised £3k via amazon smile. That's far better PR than them giving £1m novelty cheques to some remote city based charity.
How is it better PR if hardly anybody knows about it?
The email they sent to me was they are going to take the money from my local charity and instead give it to ex Prime Minister Gordon Brown
I've seen it happen first hand in similar sized companies.
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.
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."
Where does this say anything about corrupt charities.
This is exactly the controversy. Customers are not making donations in these types of programs. Whether a portion of the proceeds are donated or not, the customer pays the same price. Hence, all of it is the retailer's income. The customer only influences to whom the retailer donates and how much. And because the customer is not the donor in the transaction, organizations do not get contact information.
Despite this arrangement, customers often consider themselves a donor anyway, and some have argued this can lead to a reduction in overall donations as a result.
> Finally the last part of your comment is so disturbing.
It is disturbing. Myths abound, and organizations sometimes struggle to educate donors about the basics of philanthropy, especially the larger numbers of donors with smaller pockets.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-amazon-is-smiling-and_b_4...
In the case of AmazonSmile, I think it's hit or miss. Plenty of organizations get paltry payouts. We've averaged less than $20 a quarter since we've been participating over the last four years, and almost of third of those quarters had no payout at all.
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.
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.
I run one of those long tails and Amazon Smile was just right to cover running costs for hosting, bank fees, etc.
Source: I'm a dumbass MBA admittee.
Is the money that good?
Ya sure this is what you learn in school?
> a sizeable contribution to their end of year bonus figure
Highly doubt they’re getting bonuses at Amazon.
Bonus or not, some line item adjustments do put you in line for promotions.
(As someone paranoid of targeted advertising, but who doesn't mind normal advertising, the death of Amazon Smile was the final push I needed to move all my Amazon tabs into their own Firefox Container.)
Can you explain that?
Amazon started its history with a deep affiliate system whereby "anyone" (capable of creating an affiliate account) could create affiliate marked links to get a small profit share on items sold, plus marketing reports and other information (which only grew more detailed over time). Because of that, affiliate links are everywhere on the web. Advertising companies themselves also use them both to get an extra cut on the advertised item and also to get those juicy marketing reports for ad spam.
Originally affiliate marks in URLs were easy to spot, they were just query parameters (after the ?) and removing all query parameters removed affiliate info from Amazon links. (There are still ancient ones out there like that.) After a while, and I don't know when the transition date was, these started to get embeded sometimes "steganographically" in other parts of the URL.
At one point, as a blogger with bloated ideas of my own influence I set up an affiliate account for myself. For a few years after that, I liked to use Amazon in "Affiliate mode" where it had an extra toolbar at the top that would let me at least take any link I was looking at and replace any affiliate marks with my own. I could use that to stop sending marketing info to links that I had followed (and sometimes make a couple pennies back on purchases, like one of the world's dumbest credit card rewards systems).
The way Amazon Smile operated is that it basically earmarked the money that would have gone to an affiliate for the charity of your choice. (I wouldn't be surprised if Smile had just been implemented as a pseudo-affiliate, which also adds to other conspiracy thinking that Smile might not have been that hard to maintain from an implementation standpoint.) Because the charity was set in your user preferences there's no use for affiliate marks in URLs, so none of the smile.amazon.com URLs have affiliate marks at all because they don't need them.
So the easiest way to take any www.amazon.com URL you could find in the wild and make sure it didn't have any affiliate marks and wouldn't send data or cash back to an affiliate was to simply replace www with smile and let Amazon's own backend refresh the URL without affiliate marks. This was useful for cleaning your own browsing histories of marketing data and also for making sure that if you were forwarding links on to friends and loved ones they also weren't accidentally sending tracking data back to some affiliate with no real need to know.
It's firmly Amazon's money at that point. You bought something from them... their choice on how to spend it. They were generous enough to have this program at all, really.
I would recommend finding a decent charity organization that speaks to you and what is important to you - and donate directly. Use services like Charity Navigator (or similar) to find reputable ones that maximize your impact.
do you have evidence of this assertion?
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.
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.
Worse, Amazon has set up their own charities to donate to.
Just because the charity sausage gets made in ways that isn't always appealing doesn't mean there aren't charities that have impact.
There are good charities that do spend 70-99% of their revenues on their cause. And there are high-profile charities that don't.
If you’re a charity that say collects for homeless people, even if the charity says they spend 90% on the cause, the actual benefits to the homeless people is actually close to maybe 30-50%. They creatively spend money “for the cause” like printing pamphlets or spending on a fundraising event or hiring a “consultant” to strategize on how to fix homelessness or plenty of others.
I knew before posting that my comment was going to be downvoted. But it was made from a place of hurt after being involved in multiple charities big and small. There are genuine grassroots community based charities that work well. But they are few. Most well run charities spend at best 60% of the money wisely.
Printing and distributing pamphlets that educate those with means of influence to make things better does support the cause. Fundraising expenses are overhead and reported as such. Hiring a consultant to help an organization carry out its mission also supports the cause. Just because the organization isn't giving 100% of its receipts into the hands of the homeless directly doesn't mean they aren't helping the homeless.
That said, there are probably plenty of organizations with suspicious claims. Take charity: water's 100% claim. They like to use it to appear like they have no overhead, but it's just wordsmithing. It's also a rather egregious example of how being to focused on eliminating overhead can be harmful.
https://thefundraisingauthority.com/fundraising-ideas/charit...
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...
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.
same
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.
I think this will hurt smaller charities. They might not have been getting a huge donation from Smile, but I also think a lot of Smile users aren't going to consciously donate to the charity they selected - certainly not in the $5-$10 range that is probably more than most individual shoppers accounted for each term - and as a result those charities will be taking in less than before.
Smile was a good program. I have no idea what it cost Amazon to operate, but I am pretty confident it resulted in more money going to charity than whatever Amazon will now do instead.
This is an attempt to recover revenue, nothing more.
Here's Meta as an example https://about.meta.com/giving-together/
They gave $7B to all sorts of random stuff like cat shelters
Pretty much every company has some stuff like this. Don't you see think it'd be weird if Amazon was the 1 company that doesnt?
Edit: Better article here that distinguishes between Meta's matching and donation from meta users https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/fundraise-for-nonprofits-g....
My point is they are trying to sugarcoat this as focusing on specific charities, whereas I believe total donation dollars is going to drop. In addition, I think Amazon is hoping to save on costs having to manage AmazonSmile itself.
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'm involved with some small makerspaces. The largest has a few hundred members.
If a quarter of them both used Smile and pledged their donations to us (a quarter is almost certainly way too high), let's say that's 100 people.
If the average person spends about $1000 on Amazon (almost certainly too high [1]), then that's $5 per person, or $500 per year total.
I guess it's something, but all those estimates are on the high end for the spaces I know, and still wouldn't cover a couple weeks' rent.
1. Prime members spend an average of $1400/yr, non-prime members spend $600, and roughly one out of the adults are prime members. https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/th...
They do great work.
Large charities leech off the existence of the problems they are claiming to solve. If they actually solved them, they wouldn't be needed any more. Name any large organization that has ever worked itself out of needing to exist. And their executives make a lot of money.
Among those people, some were chronically homeless, which basically means mentally ill, disabled and/or addicted to something. Nobody is paying for housing and health care for these people for less than $40k per year.
The majority of those people, however, are not in that group. They also didn’t stay homeless all year - over the course of one year, many times that number were nearly homeless and got help from those funds to avoid it (pay back rent to avoid eviction, pay a deposit on a new place, etc), or used these funds for services while homeless - shelter, job training, medical care, assistance applying for disability payments, etc. Besides directly funding these services, the money was also spent in paying people to manage job training programs, run the shelters, be social workers who know how disability applications work, be social workers who have to find their homeless clients to tell them about work opportunities, track available spaces in rehab programs, ……………
Your attempted equivalency there is missing so much information that it is uselessly wrong.
This opinion can lead to some really ignorant statements (which I've heard before) :
- Full time jobs at charities? Money laundering for sure, they should reject their salary and starve. - Investing in clean energy? A conspiracy, some people make money there. - Recycling? People are paid to do it, it's a sham. - Politician not forfeiting his salary? Corruption, they shouldn't make a living (or just take brides under the table).
This is an interesting take, but got me wondering, what organization _period_ has ever worked itself out of needing to exist? I'd love to hear examples.
Worse, there is a well-known phenomenon [1] where if people's "guilt" is taken away, then they are less likely to donate overall. That is, for at least some portion of people, they probably mark a small charity as their Amazon Smile recipient and then think "Great, I'm donating to charity!", not realizing their donations are like 50 cents. But if they didn't sign up for Amazon Smile they might be more likely to actually donate a real amount.
To be clear, I'm all for small charities getting money, but I'd almost rather it be like a lottery or something so a smaller number of small charities could get money they could actually do something with.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...
Funny sidenote is that my chosen charity was actually ProPublica
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.
- certain large universities
- certain large hospitals
And that's it. I wrote to HR multiple times asking if my local health related charity could be part of their matching donations. Finally got a terse answer saying "no, only the ones on the list."
Some enterprises are so scared of anything remotely resembling controversy that they severely restrict matching, and others just don't offer it at all.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is fantastic about employee matching.
I bet if the offered round up for charity in the checkout process the funds collected would dwarf those raised by the smile program.
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.
There's something very "early 21st century social trust crisis" about keeping the "capitalist utlitarianism" logos of neoliberalism while throwing out the "democratized decision making" ethos of neoliberalism.
Like, I get it, it’s not just a slush fund, but maybe it sort of should be. Does every dollar spent have to have clear ROI? Where’s the charity?
Carefully recorded in tax filings.
A coworker had an interested high school student come in for the day/week a few times, and shadow them.
For many kids whose parents have never heard of white collar work, it can be life changing to have a good impression.
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".
Put another way, not every (e.g.) $5000 yields the same impact.
More in fewer hands? Where have we've seen that before? How's that working out for us?
It also gives Amazon much more control over the charity. If you give $1000 to a charity, they are happy and do their thing. If you give a charity $1,000,000 your priorities are going to become their priorities.
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.
I don't often click on affiliate links, but I also don't recall seeing the smile reminder when I have used them. YMMV I guess.
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.
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
Seriously. Amazon is literally just writing a check, or just as likely, putting store credit in an account.
Where do they figure in to donating at all beyond a middle man?
Seriously, how does Amazon differ than GoFundMe in this context? And as a follow up, if this is such a good move for “effectiveness” why shouldn’t GoFundMe do they same thing?
I've now opted for the "free" shipping that you get when you spend $25+. Items that I cannot wait for I will buy local, which usually now offer same day delivery.
That doesn't sound entirely artificial to me, though? It seems more likely that they're reserving stock in closer (and likely, more expensive) warehouses for people who are paying for two day shipping, either by having a Prime membership or by paying for the shipping.
While there are definitely periods where I would have agreed with you, recently Amazon has seriously increased the % of products which are deliverable same day.
It's also not just for common items. I can buy a thermocouple amplifier board and have it delivered today. It really scratches an itch when you can get components for a project delivered THAT DAY. I could be playing with thermocouples TODAY. Hard to resist.
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.
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."
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.
In 2019 Amazon paid zero taxes receiving a net $129 million refund from the federal government, in 2018 they received a $137 million refund after paying 0$ on a net income of 11.2 billion dollars.
In 2020 they paid a net tax of $162 million on $13.9 billion of pre-tax income a net tax rate of 1.2%.
To imply Amazon (or any corp) are floating by with a total tax load of ~1% is either profoundly disingenuous or profoundly naïve.
The SS tax that gets deducted from your paycheck is only half the amount. Employers are required to pay the other half.
If you're self-employed, you pay both halves, and that is one of the penalties of being treated as self employed.
Additionally, receiving a refund indicates that Amazon overpaid on their income taxes and that the government agreed.
Also additionally, the figures you are throwing around are income taxes only. Amazon likely pays many other taxes far in excess of the net worth of anybody involved in this conversation. Implying that Amazon "paid zero taxes" without further qualification is wholly dishonest, and you know it, and you should stop doing it.
Also getting a refund does not imply you paid any income taxes can get refunded even if they send in 0$ money as was the case for Amazon in 2017, 2018, and 2019. The refund simply refers to getting money back.
That's not $180K deduction, but a $180K credit.
She'll rent the place out for a meager profit, so doesn't have to pay the rest of the mortgage. Essentially, the taxpayers bought her the house - she got a house + cash out of the deal.
Small business owners definitely play games with taxes.
Cost Segregation
Bonus Depreciation
(There's a third one I can't remember).
She basically utilized all three. The larger the value of the house (over $1M in her case), the greater the benefit.
This is also because they are high income earners (one of them has a regular job), and they've manipulated things so that they can apply the deduction to the W-2 income (not usually possible). The federal tax bracket is 35+% - not sure if they can apply it to their state's income tax, but if they can, it's another 10-11%. So you don't need a massive deduction to get the equivalent of $180K refund.
Write off practically the entire vehicle (sometimes the entire vehicle) in the first year... making it nearly or completely free.
There's a lot of credits and deductions available to those who seek them out, or are in a position to best use them. They are not loopholes - these provisions were explicitly laid out by Congress.
Family, ownership, and business are concepts that overlap and mean much different things than a $1 trillion company with countless nameless faceless employees around the globe, that you can buy shares of.
I can’t think of a metric where they aren’t worse than the average retailer.
Per man hour? Amazon is rich and super high volume relatively speaking. I got the impression their warehouses were pretty damn good compared to other warehouses handling consumer goods because the cost of hiccups is so high and they have a huge target on their back.
If anything the dehumanizing algorithmic tracking and optimization crap they do annoys me far more than the safety stuff.
Amazon’s extreme turnover rate is also significant. Someone that’s been doing a job for longer has both the skill and physical capacity to avid injury doing the same tasks as a new employee. This compounds over long shifts as people get tired, so limiting new employees to 8 vs 12 hour shifts would make a real difference among other options.
I used to work for Amazon a few years ago. I'm uncertain whether it was 12 pounds or 12 kg, but when a *tote weights more than this, you are supposed to handle the tote with two people.
*A tote is a small container of items, like this yellow one: https://media.wired.com/photos/593256d9aef9a462de9820d8/mast...
The bigger issue is that no one is actually asking for help because of culture.
This is the correct impression. Amazon warehouses are almost always a step up in both pay and quality of life vs. the other local employment options.
Source: many friends work(ed) the industry. Amazon was seen as trading your autonomy in for a better overall place to work.
The memes about their warehouses being the worst in the world only really exist in white collar circles.
I could never work for them in such a job, because I require too much autonomy to be happy. I don't deal will with strict metric systems that they enforce. However, others really do enjoy that aspect of not having to put an ounce of thought or problem solving into their dayjob.
The other personality I've noticed is someone who prefers a much more "sane" (boring but very predictable work) working environment with a ton of rules around it. They enjoy being treated more like robots.
I could be projecting here, but I've seen more than a dozen or so datapoints - of course directly connected to my personal bubble so there is bias at play.
I'd absolutely never take an Amazon warehouse job. I'd be looking at jobs like you describe.
What is everyone ordering that is subpar? Do people not just buy the same brands they’d buy at Walmart or target?
If you buy cheap stuff that was drop shipped off AliExpress, but reputable name brands from walmart… why not buy reputable brands from amazon?
Amazon has had wage theft issues, but I don’t know how they stack up on undocumented workers or the average retailer which includes Costco etc not just tiny corner stores.
Wage theft: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262294/amazon-flex-wage-... more wage theft: https://www.wweek.com/news/2022/11/15/murmurs-amazon-settles... you can find a bunch of these going back years but this is what I was initially thinking of: https://www.fastcompany.com/3020175/employees-sue-amazon-ove...
If you say you linked a statistic, it seems reasonable to me to assume that you linked a statistic.
Also, statistics include facts like more than average not just specific numerical values.
PS: Though I have also linked to the numeric value before just not in this comment chain.
It's important to be looking at the same numbers when having a discussion about those numbers.
For more detail, I have taken statistics, even tutored PHD students.
Showing your work is required if the answer is 4.415 or more than average. A sample refers to a single element, statistic encompass a sample, a parameter covers to the full population.
You will often hear statistics communicated as something like “more than four times as likely” and assume it’s referring to 4<X<5 but they can also be used in cases when a measurement exceeded the range at which you can quantify it. As in you checked the rain gauge and it was full, in such cases the only option is to use > X.
None of the stuff you mention actually means anything when you try to apply it to policy if you don't know how the result was achieved, what it's actually measuring, and what the baseline is. Any good statistical analysis will cover this as well as things like biases, corrections, and confidence. Otherwise I could give you a fact of my opinion is more liked than your opinion...
The samples that make such a calculation true. That’s what you’re missing an actual statistic X>Y is based on the underlying data.
Further someone can just as easily make up X = 27.24 +/- 0.01 with a 95% confidence interval as X > Y, it’s the actual data that makes something a fact rather than an option.
“None of the stuff you mention actually means anything when you try to apply it to policy if you don't know how the result was achieved, what it's actually measuring, and what the baseline is.” Again that applies equally to all statistics and you can provide them just as easily with either format.
THAT'S WHAT I'M ASKING TO SEE! Which you didn't initial post!
https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
If the US labor US labor force is ~161.2 million workers and had 8B/year in wage theft then the average per 1 million workers is ~50 million. Seeing multiple payouts well over 50 million suggests Amazon could be worse than average here.
Increased shared hatred of the employer leads to increased employee cohesion?
One I've seen that I think might have promise is "white people" being the outgroup for "white people." Any collection of white people forms an ad hoc in group where some nondescript "everyone else" is the outgroup. Now everyone has a shared thing to hate but everyone you interact with becomes temporally part of your ingroup so you're never hating an specific person or group of people. And even though it's impossible to actually become part of the outgroup you still have some of the fear that if you embody the negative traits that are ascribed to the outgroup you might join them so it also gradually norms.
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.
Antitrust laws exist to protect consumers, and if you're forcing consumers to buy inferior mousetraps, you're not helping.
I'm arguing for it because it's an example of "third way" regulation, regulation that should be embraced by left wing socialist and right wing capitalists.
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.
Sadly, I don't see Amazon losing any steam, but I sure hope it does.
Personally I get stuff from Amazon almost daily because I don't want to go to, e.g., Walgreens to buy toothpaste and dishwasher detergent. For a large number of items, there is no benefit to inspecting the item prior to purchase. Going to store for such items would be a waste of time.
Moreover, I can buy the thing immediately ftom my phone. No need to set up going to buy x as some chore in the future.
Tip your delivery person sometimes.
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.
https://smile.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=15576745011
Ah, looks like it was only for the phone app. It makes you re-enroll twice a year.
On the website of course you have to remember to go there every time, unless you got a browser extension.
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.
The last one is hardly offered anymore, I used to try to game orders to get it but now I get:
prime slower day, sometime next year, hahahaha
as the options
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.
Can you direct me to any place where the LGB Alliance officially affirms “trans hate” as their core message?
Seems like a remark that fails the barest minimum of common sense thresholds, in that it’s unclear to me how any such body could ever hope to remain a tax-deductible registered charity.
LGB Alliance states that it believes many cases of transition are actually a form of therapy to remove gay-ness. That a gay person is led to believe they can be "straight" if they transition to the opposite sex. So in their view, transitioning is a form of homophobia, but in the view of trans groups, the LGB alliance is anti-trans. From the LGB Alliance webpage:
> Very many children, and quite possibly adults, enter the process of gender transition as a result of the homophobia of their parents, peer group, or their own internalised dislike of their sexual orientation. Young gay men or lesbians are being sold a myth that they can be straight, that lesbians are really straight men and that gay men are really straight women. This is homophobic conversion therapy.
Maybe that’s just me, but I think we should have higher expectations to the language used in discussions on HN.
If we agree this is about a policy-disagreement, then let’s use those words. Don’t use the word “hate” when no actual hate is involved.
It doesn’t help bring across any points, it doesn’t make you look better, it doesn’t seek constructive replies and it doesn’t help the conversation.
Enough with the “hate” already.
Anyone not actively supporting trans-rights these days are effectively labelled a “hater” or transphobic.
Essentially the trans-activist doing their best to gaslight the situation and get as much chilling effect as possible.
It’s dishonest, undemocratic and should be enough reason for most reasonable people to distrust them.
And yeah. I’m transphobic for posting this, obviously.
There is no gaslighting whatsoever, one of the co-founders literally, somewhat famously, broke down in court when backed into a logical corner about whether trans women were lesbians. Even if you take the naive definition of "transphobia" where there must be actual fear it still holds up.
Of course they don't say their beliefs are transphobic. That's the real rhetoric -- because they're happy to tell you that they think that trans women are men who pretend to be women like that doesn't invalidate the very core definition of what it means to be trans.
This group would run into no trouble whatsoever had they had no stance at all about trans people and just said that they preferred to focus on the sexuality rather than gender issues.
As a result, you have situations like, for example, males identifying as lesbians expecting actual female lesbians to be open to dating them, and accusing them of transphobia if they decline. This is a problem as by the usual/previous definitions, the former are heterosexual males who are imposing themselves on homosexual females.
This sort of thing is what the LGB Alliance was set up to oppose, given that most other gay rights organisations (Stonewall in particular) have fully immersed themselves in the ideology of gender identity.
But there's nothing hateful about that. It's a perfectly reasonable position, held by the vast majority of people worldwide. The reason trans-activists are working to get acceptance for such a view, is in fact because it is not the dominant view (or why else would they need to promote it?).
Would you care to outline why you'd categorize having a specific view on gender and sex which differs from the one driven by these activists as "hateful"? Just what part here is hate?
It's a genuine question. I honestly don't understand this mentality or world-view.
As for a cure, that should be a matter for the patient to decide if they want one or not.
I strongly suspect that your quote marks should actually be inverted commas.
[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.
I assume it can be hard to transition between charity and for-profit work. Are charities following with the hiring-freeze? Wouldn't freelancers be more welcome in these times, given that they're easy to let go? Good luck in any case.
The hiring freeze/layoffs, as best I can tell, has been driven by activist hedge funds like TCI and Elliot Managmenet encouraging companies to make big cuts for a short term increase in the bottom line, not by any major actual economic issues for most tech companies.
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.
I expect cynical HN commenters would make the similarly snarky comments about how X company is only committing to Y time period.
But if Amazon committed to Smile for 2 years, then they could say "We're re-upping our commitment for 2 more years" every 2 years, bringing even more PR for it. And when it ended, there would still be some outrage, but probably not as much.
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.
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 $Bs they invested which they will put as a write-off.
I went searching around for options after this change and the things I like seeing about Cultivate is that it both tells me about options to purchase an item on a site that is NOT Amazon, as well as keeping the donation feature.
I really struggle to find an example of something that you can only buy on Amazon, short of relisted aliexpress garbage that you should be avoiding anyway out of safety concerns.
and their pay rates for warehouse workers is high enough that it tends to raise wages in the surrounding areas.
Same reason we use 3$/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
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/?...
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.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/487741/number-of-firms-i...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_...
$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."
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.
“Patron pages for past fiscal years” section
It would be politically inconvenient for the FSF to accept that they get donations in kind from Amazon or Microsoft, given the FSF's regular attacks on the two companies.
Sad to see this program go.
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.
Like airline miles. You can convince yourself that X number of miles is "worth" $10k because they let you fly business class to Asia. In reality you don't value that flight at $10k because you wouldn't pay $10k to fly business class if you didn't have the points.
> 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.
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.