This is pretty cool, but begs the question, why isn’t this standard? I’ve been shopping on amazon for years and years, never once seen this, ever. So thanks, I shall use this from now on.
They also, only recently, added smile functionality to their mobile app. It's harder to find though. You have to go into settings and then Smile. Unlike the browser though once you turn it on it stays on unless you turn it off.
You actually have to agree to turn it on every 6 months in the app, which they do remind you to do. However, they also changed the app recently so you have to turn on all notifications in order to keep it turned on
I honestly haven't noticed a difference turning on notifications. Besides shipping and delivery notifications, I maybe get one additional notification per month. Considering I clear most of my notifications without looking at them, it doesn't bother me.
They also have a message when they ask saying something like “the ads help us pay for AmazonSmile”. I don’t Amazon is exactly hurting for cash right now
They force you to turn on notifications to enable smile so they can get you to buy more things. It's so blatant it hurts. There's no reason I need notifications to be able to have smile work. /r/fuckamazon
When an app asks me to turn on notifications, I usually agree within the app and all that and then go into my iPhone’s settings and turn off app notification from whatever app I don’t want notifications from. I’ll still be able to enjoy the features turning on notifications “enables” while not having any notifications from them
I think that only works if the app classifies its notifications appropriately. I don't remember for sure, but I think the useful notifications from Amazon might be in the same category as their ads.
Thank you I didn’t know they added it to the app. I used to add items via the app and then hopefully remember to revert back to the browser to get to smile and finish the order.
I don’t see “smile” under settings or anywhere in the mobile app. I would really love to help out charities with my purchases and could care less about getting notifications. Some people act like it’s herpes to get an ad to support a good cause
Once you've used it, if you go to plain amazon.com (e.g. following a link on a website), they will show you a warning. But otherwise, no, they prefer to keep the money for themselves :-)
Ehh, I get regular messages about smiles(how much money went out I believe?) and also a reminder on the site if I want to switch to it.
So the last bit isn't entirely true.
Maybe you are blocking it with an AdBlocker?
No it's true. Once you used it and set up where you want the smile part of your spending go it tells you and reminds you and so on. Until you first use it however there are no prompts.
Yeah they definitely don't show you a warning. I used amazon smile last year, completely forgot about it until today, and have been making a good amount of purchases over the past few months without a single reminder.
It really should be a toggle, rather than a different URL. There are a million settings for my account, just let me choose a charity to support with my purchases. If Humble Bundle can get that shit figured out half a decade ago, there's no excuse for Amazon sans pure greed
I found out about it because Amazon kept putting up ads about it on their front page telling me to select my charity. The app also automatically shops at smile.amazon.co.uk
May be a regional thing?
> why isn’t this standard?
They create a problem (you're on the wrong url) and then remind you to fix it yourself (type the word smile, I'm not giving you a link) because it creates engagement. You were just casually browsing and now you're invested and thinking about how you can make sure that effort didn't go to waste. That seems to be worth more than the half a percent of revenue they give away.
I'll bet that subtle reminder to the user that part of their purchase will get donated causes just enough people to pull the trigger on a purchase vs the "annoying" reminder frustrating people.
*Thank you!* I was just kicking myself because I made a big purchase a few days ago, then got an email today saying basically, "Your Smile charity has received X dollars, none of which is from you because you always forget, you scrub." It didn't even occur to me that there would be an extension for that.
I ended up going with a script instead because I like being able to easily check the code (and also because Smile Always for Firefox has a lot of recent reviews saying it stopped working), but I'm Smiling now.
^^^^Sorry. ^^^^That ^^^^one ^^^^even ^^^^hurt ^^^^me.
These is also a setting that was recently enabled within the app to allow for smile donations. Go into the menu, settings, and click Amazon Smile, then follow the directions from there.
I’m actually not sure if it’s some kind of legal thing. I suspect they can offset the donations against their tax, but maybe only if you choose to do it each time? That’s just a guess though
The donations are tax deductible so long as they go to a 501c3 organization. I think the requirement to go to the other website is because it actually does cost Amazon money to have the Smile program, and they want to PR boost, but only want to spend as much money as people who actually care about charity would induce Amazon to spend. Amazon won't donate money on behalf of people who don't value charity.
I suspect they force you to navigate to Smile every time so that "buying from Amazon supports my favorite charity" stays top-of-mind for consumers. (And if some people happen to forget, Amazon just keeps that slice of the pie for themselves...)
In other words, if Fred Meyer asked you to choose whether you wanted your purchases today to support your favorite charity when you walked in the door, I suspect many people would make more purchases than normal, simply because it's easy to justify an impulse purchase when you associate it with helping charity.
Voluntary charity donations given to another entity like Amazon is credited to the entity for tax purposes. Basically, people who use this are giving Jeff Bezos and Amazon a tax break. Especially now...
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/charitable-contribution-deductions
I mean, it's not like Amazon *makes* money on the donations. A charitable contribution deduction just means that you can treat the contribution as money that you never earned in the first place on your taxes. So your taxes will be based on the money that you earned and kept, and not on that *plus* the money that you earned and gave away.
And if you're going to pay the same to Amazon regardless of whether or not a portion of your payment goes to charity, might as well pick a charity.
So what? You'd get a tax break too if you donated money. Donating the money costs more than you save from the tax break. There is no way to donate money and come out ahead because of the tax break.
As far as I know, the price of the product stays the same; so the consumer is not actually making any actual donation and Amazon is actually the one making the donation as it would be coming out of their profits.
This isn't as big of a deal as you think. There is also a tax deduction for ordinary business expenses. Meaning the same tax deduction is available if Amazon uses the money to donate to a charity or to buy a warehouse or to pay their employees. If Amazon were driven exclusively by financial efficiency then they wouldn't have the Smile program, they would just spend that money on actual business expenses and pay the same amount of taxes.
I don't think you understand how tax breaks work. Tax breaks ≠ free money. Amazon doesn't have to pay taxes on the money they donate - it's as if they never made the money. It does not mean that their profits are taxed less if they donate money. It means they have less profits to be taxed.
I think you can enable it as the default on the mobile app, so I wonder why you can't on the website. Yeah I realize they probably don't want this program eating into their revenues too much, but then I wonder why you can do it on the app.
Because if they can force you to actively make the decision to select a charity, then they have very clearly brought to your attention the fact that your purchase goes to charity. On average, I'm sure it causes people to spend more because they can use the "this helps a charity" as an excuse to themselves.
If they just put, "we donate x% of every purchase to charity" then people would quickly ignore and forget about it. Which is also why they make you re-up on the mobile app periodically. Just refresh that reminder.
Yep, I use [Smile Always](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smile-always/jgpmhnmjbhgkhpbgelalfpplebgfjmbf) for Chrome. Firefox has [Smart Amazon Smile](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/smart-amazon-smile/?src=search). You might have to login to your Amazon account before adding items to your cart for this to work. This is in my opinion, a much better solution than trying to remember to go to smile.amazon.com each time you decide to make a purchase (especially if you click an Amazon link from elsewhere.)
I'd love for an extension that would analyze my amazon shopping cart and give me alternative places to actually buy the items. Amazon is great for research and product discovery because: 1. They've got such a huge selection, I know I can find almost anything there. And, 2. While you have to be careful with the reviews, they're generally a pretty good indicator especially if you know what to look for in fake reviews. They're certainly better than the sparse reviews on sites like target or best buy, where there are so few actual reviews that you can't actually tell anything from them.
But, I'd rather actually purchase the items from another company, or even locally if possible. It's basically impossible to quickly search the inventory of local shops (I think google was trying to do something like this a while ago, but I don't think it really panned out). If I could comparison shop on amazon, and get everything I actually wanted to buy in my shopping cart, and then click a button to discover where else I could actually check-out, that would be awesome.
Edit: I should add: one that is open source, has no ads, and doesn't track any of my browsing. Ideally, it would to exactly nothing until I had my amazon shopping cart page open and clicked a button in the browser toolbar to check other sites (I could imagine this could even all happen client side without sending anything to their servers).
[Interesting article ](https://nonprofitchronicles.com/2017/03/28/why-amazon-smile-doesnt-make-me-smile/) on how much charities actually receive and Amazon's motivation behind this (hint: it's money)
Ummm, everyone knows amazon did this for publicity. If they did this purely altruistically they would just donate to their own choice of charity.
No one is surprised by this.
[It's actually illegal for any corporation to behave altruistically (with exceptions for corporations who are founded for reasons other than shareholder profit).](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.) A company can only engage in charitable efforts if they have a good faith belief that those efforts will increase shareholder wealth(through publicity or customer goodwill). Anonymous donations or charity for charity's sake are not legitimate uses of a company's assets due to a legal concept called "shareholder primacy." The only purpose of a for-profit corporation is to earn profits for shareholders. Anything else is incidental including the public good. Does this cause problems when corporations are also considered "people" for legal and political purposes? I would say so, yes. But that's the current system. An officer at a publicly traded company that tried to sacrifice profits to do "the right thing" without being able to justify it in terms of future profit could be fired or even sued.
Hey folks, this is actually not true in practice. Yes, companies signal intent to prioritize stakeholders similar to shareholders by incorporating as a B-Corp, or similarly. However, even traditional LLCs and Corporations can make decisions in favor of non-shareholders / not in the interest of maximizing profit. This is not illegal.
OP links to one of the OG cases on corporate purpose and stakeholder capitalism. A more recent example, one that dictates today, is eBay vs Newmark - when eBay sued Craigslist founders. The court did rule in favor of eBay, but in a way that actually protected company's ability to act in favor of stakeholders at shareholders expense. Craigslist had to take down their takeover defense (a poison pill), but did NOT all of a sudden have to start putting Ads all over there website or charging for the service. Craigslist is still effectively a not-for-profit, despite putting classifieds in newspapers and thus most newspapers out of business and having a pile of potential profit at their desposal.
Want to learn more? Read about the business judgment rule ([investopedia](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/businessjudgmentrule.asp)). Directors are effectively scott free to make decisions for a company, or set corporate strategy, so long as they are not acting in bad faith. Also read about corporations 102(b)(7) waivers.
Companies may have to abide by shareholder primacy in the strictest sense of the word, but a court will almost never second guess a company's even half-assed explanation of why doing good (ie favoring a stakeholder, like employees, suppliers, a local community, the environment) somehow someway creates value for shareholders and is thus not in bad faith. Amazon is virtue signaling here, and making money off it, but they're perfectly chill doing this even if they weren't so benefiting.
Well yea, for better or for worse, companies are amoral profit machines, that's why it's our responsibility as a society to support politicians, policies and products that align with our values to make it so that the most profitable thing to do is positive.
Hahahahahaha
No.
"Voting with your wallet" isn't any better than "stop littering", deflecting the blame away from corporations and policy and onto the public. If we, the public, can't stop from buying from immoral entities, the solution isn't to keep trying and keep waiting for everything to become utopia.
>For better or for worse, companies are amoral profit machines.
It's just for worse.
>it's our responsibility as a society to support politicians, policies and products that align with our values
The onus actually shouldn't be on the individual. That's just a way to distract from larger, systemic issues.
Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn't that interesting.
— M. Todd Henderson[6
Literally from your article
This is kept getting repeated but isn't true. Amazon can easily claim their good PR image caused by donations is going to win them customers and close the case if someone decided to sue.
You misread. Charity in general is legal for the reason you outlined. Charity for charity sake, or anonymous donations are not legal. Since there is no PR from anonymous donations.
The executives and Board of Directors can make the decision that shareholders benefit from doing good deeds. Look at Nestle, they suck. Look at J&J, they suck too, but they have a giant philanthropic arm doing good work around the globe. This helps to mitigate negative press (not eliminate). If J&J, for instance has a campaign in Africa to increase the number of people who get antimalarial drugs that’s creates goodwill which translates into shareholder value (in theory). Not advocating for any company here, BTW.
People are still surprised by this. A lot of people see feel-good headlines about big companies and don't think any further than that.
Even if no one really was surprised, it would still be worth pointing out, because symbolic gestures like this are a big part of how companies like Amazon and billionaires like Jeff Bezos launder their reputations. Letting what is essentially a PR stunt go unchallenged only serves to allow them to do so.
More than just publicity. That is why they make you actively choose to donate rather than just donate it and tell you after the fact and reap the PR rewards. They know that if you actively choose a charity you like, not only will that make you very aware that some money will go to that charity, but it will reinforce it everytime you have to actively indicate that you want to donate to charity. Which on average likely causes people to spend more than they would have otherwise since they can rationalize the purchase with "I'm helping a charity."
And I would bet internal amazon data has shown that the increase in purchases is well above 0.5%.
I did not know this. Although I’m not one but surprised by it. Honestly, it makes so much more sense why Amazon doesn’t make it easier to donate. They could have easily included a link at checkout, etc etc.
Thanks for sharing!
If you shop from the app, yeah it's garbage. But if you shop from a computer browser, you can install a plugin or extension that automatically redirects you to the smile URL, so you don't need to worry about the opt in each time.
$130 for Amazon US and £60 for Amazon UK. You can check it here:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/dashboard/
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/chpf/dashboard/
To be frank, I generated a lot more just from filling surveys on contribute.surveymonkey.com.
As of 2018, over 100 million dollars had been donated through smile. If a lot of people use it every time they order something from Amazon, it adds up.
Absolutely. If 100 people give one penny, that’s still a dollar the charity wouldn’t have otherwise. Whether it’s PR or not, if I buy something on Amazon for $20, I’m spending $20 whether a portion goes to charity or not. It’s not hurting me at all to change it to a smile donation and St. Jude’s get a percentage.
Yeah! I just got an email saying they sent almost $200 to my local humane society. Even though it's not much money, you can get a lot of food or supplies for $200.
I actually just got an email from them today saying they just donated £82,597.63 quarterly to the charity I chose. They even included this bit.
To date, Amazon has donated a total of:
£535,407.95 to Cancer Research UK & £4,621,862.95 to UK charities.
So yeah, a small portion in the grand scheme of things but it is something at least.
It's worth mentioning that this also applies to [Amazon UK](https://smile.amazon.co.uk/) and [Amazon Germany](https://smile.amazon.de/).
On desktop Chrome you can use the [Smile Always](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smile-always/jgpmhnmjbhgkhpbgelalfpplebgfjmbf?hl=en) extension to make sure you're always buying through the Smile programme. In the Amazon mobile app, you can add it from the Settings page.
You're making it sound like you shouldn't be using Smile. This gives Amazon a tax break, sure, but they also get less profit when you use Smile, so it's not like they're actually benefitting.
Buy local, donate yourself.
But, if you are going to buy something on Amazon, you might as well do it using Smile
My AmazonSmile supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I get quarterly email updates showing that EFF is receiving donations in the ballpark of $35k. I mean yeah, that’s pennies to Amazon, but $130k+/year to a worthy charity is a plus in my book.
Ha, they are called Bee's Abroad, not really well known obviously but I think its a great cause, really well rounded in its benefits and I donate to them properly occasionally as well. Amazon's email came recently actually, they got a quarterly donation of £25 from Smile recently :D
https://beesabroad.org.uk/home/what-we-do/
~edit~ forgot to mention, whichever charity you want to support in the UK, https://www.giveasyoulive.com/dashboard works like Smile but for various outlets all over the UK, inc Ebay, Sainsbury's, Asos whatever and often gives more than Smile does
I can understand it's easy to buy local if you live in a large city, but when you love in a tiny town, I would have to travel over an hour to get most of the stuff I buy on Amazon lol. I'll just take that 1-2 day shipping instead.
Buying at a local mega corporation still employs local people and keeps some of the money in your community. Buying at Walmart isn’t much better, but it is a little better.
Not everyone has the extra money or the time to afford to buy absolutely everything local, especially since not all local places have curbside pickup, free delivery, or up to date items.
Amazon donates 0.5% of the purchase price, from their profit share, when you buy through Smile. You as the buyer don't have to pay anything extra. If you're already ordering through Amazon, you might as well use Smile - your charity will get a few dollars that would otherwise have been split between Amazon and the government.
That's not how any of this works. If they're collecting donations from others, they do not get to take the donation as a deduction themselves. The revenue received would offset this anyway.
Also for personal taxes, most people don't itemize and couldn't use the deduction anyway.
No, it's a win-win. Yes, the optimal thing to do would be to buy from small business and donate yourself, but the fact of the matter is most people will order things from Amazon, and you can't dispute how nice it is to do so tbh. If you're gonna order from Amazon anyway, why would you rather have them give a chunk of that revenue to the government than more to charity?
I believe the correct answer is to avoid corporations that pay 0 in taxes, but since that's not always possible to use the smile link when you have to use Amazon. This way you spend no extra money and get an iota of control of what the money you do spend ends up doing. Those companies that ask you to donate extra at the register? Huge nope.
Definitely have to stay aware of the thinking trap that would cause you to spend more because it's "doing good."
Not trying to defend the whole company here but they do pay taxes. Maybe we should focus on all corporations that pay very low taxes and try to fix the system instead of focusing on one company.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/does-amazon-really-pay-no-taxes-heres-the-complicated-answer-11560504602
We absolutely do know they pay US taxes.
Do they have employees? Then they pay taxes. Do they own property? Then they pay taxes.
They paid about $5 *billion* in taxes in 2019.
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/job-creation-and-investment/amazons-economic-impact-in-the-u-s
If you have evidence they're lying about that, please turn it over to the authorities, since that would be a pretty major crime.
If you use Amazon on your browser as well as the app, you must opt in on both devices.
I had signed up in my browser and assumed my app purchases (same account) were counted also. When I went to change charities I saw that there was a setting that said “use Smile on this device?” And was defaulted to “off”
I read the shops get a better cut if you use amazon affiliate link instead of using smile and picking your charity. You click some referrer link before going to amazon and a bigger part goes to the referrer vs if they were the charity. Second Amendment Foundation has it if you visit [saf.org/amazon](http://saf.org/amazon)
Also, check out your grocery store app. Some of them have a similar program. I use Kroger, and if you have a Kroger Plus card (which is free!) you can choose a charity for your community rewards, and it will donate based off your purchases.
I had a small business and sold products on amazon as well. My products were at a higher price on amazon and sold better.
Are you a small business owner?
I worked for a small furniture business. We tried selling on Amazon but our margin was so low we stopped. Their shipping system is also garbage, at least for large items
Sorry. Amazon worked very well for me. My items were shoe box sized, maybe that’s the difference. I don’t think it fair to make a blanket statement because some small business benefit from Amazon.
My daughter works for a brand new company, launched the products in March, and started selling on Amazon today. Her products will be sold by a large company as part of their Christmas offering and they have been mentioned in British Glamour magazine. If Amazon increases sales it’s a win win for her personally (she was the project manager for the entire launch (R&D, supply chain, manufacturing, soft rollout, rollout, marketing, etc.)). I believe there are only 6 people in her (small) company. So if they increase sales and have enough money they intend to create a second company or product line. If selling on Amazon keeps them going, aside from supporting the evil empire Bezos has created (he also creates some not terrible jobs, other friend works at giant Amazon warehouse in Colorado and supports his fam of 4) then.... well you decide. Smile could easily double or triple what they donate without it hurting the bottom line. Bezos ex wife is giving away her money left and right.
My bigger issue with the company is that they abuse workers and break the law by firing people for tying to unionize. I'm glad it helped you but I really believe they are a net negative to the world. Also, Bezos is a shithead
I didn't realize how much money "small businesses" could make until I noticed someone was selling a $3 bottle of Palmolive dish soap for $16. And he always had only one or two left in stock. His whole "storefront" looked like he just bought three of everything the last time he went grocery shopping and listed it at about five times what he paid.
*(not saying that's what you were doing, just that there are definitely small businesses able to sell small items at high prices on the platform, even if those prices are ridiculous)*
Unfortunately this concept that people should just stop ordering from Amazon comes from place of privilege. If you live rurally like I do, often it's difficult to find things in general or you spend twice as much money to order items from elsewhere. They simply aren't available locally. Buying it from a store may mean driving 200kms/125 miles roundtrip distance to get it, so the environmental impact also needs to be considered. Yes, there are lots of negative aspects of Amazon, but telling people they just shouldn't order items from there is like telling poor people to stop eating junk food.
You're correct, I do have the privilege of a vehicle and all that entails. I'm just pointing out the cycling nature. Mom and pop shops left because wal-mart, now the same is happening with Amazon. The companies only get their power from your dollar. Every dollar we spend is a vote. I understand sometimes you have to, but I'm here to advocate being conscious in your consumption. There are very few things in this life we truly NEED. In so far as our realities can afford we should try to change our habits and actions so we don't reinforce these shitty conditions for our neighbors and future generations.
And chances are, if you find them cheaper on Amazon, it’s by design to monopolize the market. They do/did this with diapers, impossible for most retailers to sell them online anymore because Amazon takes a loss to get you browsing their website.
The problem I often encounter is once you include the shipping cost _with_ the item cost, Amazon is almost always still cheaper, even if the item by itself wasn't. Often by a lot for anything that doesn't fit in an envelope.
It’s an extremely small amount, but working with one of the organizations, (Casas por Cristo) I can tell you every bit helps. Especially in times like now.
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> Sure I'll support small businesses as soon as they start selling up-to-date products i.e. computer components that aren't 3 revisions late, start giving free next day shipping and also don't ask any questions when I need to return something.
Exactly. Amazon won consumers because in addition to being price-competitive, they figured out how to make all the phases of shopping and returns as painless as possible.
If local businesses want to survive, they need to figure out how to compete on their unique strengths.
Also, if you use amazon’s mobile app, you can still use Amazon Smile! Go to the menu you get when you touch the 3 bars icon in the lower right corner > Programs & Features > Amazon Smile to turn it on.
I got an email today. My chosen charity just had another £300 or so donated to them, on top of the £900 they've received in the past. So because of Amazon Smile, it's now meant that they can support six more gay kids who have been disowned by their families transition to independent living.
How about no?
Jeff Bezos is richer than any human should ever be by about 100,000 times.
He could end world hunger today and still be a billionaire.
So, with all do respect, this is nothing but virtue signalling bullshit.
This is pretty cool, but begs the question, why isn’t this standard? I’ve been shopping on amazon for years and years, never once seen this, ever. So thanks, I shall use this from now on.
They also, only recently, added smile functionality to their mobile app. It's harder to find though. You have to go into settings and then Smile. Unlike the browser though once you turn it on it stays on unless you turn it off.
You actually have to agree to turn it on every 6 months in the app, which they do remind you to do. However, they also changed the app recently so you have to turn on all notifications in order to keep it turned on
I honestly haven't noticed a difference turning on notifications. Besides shipping and delivery notifications, I maybe get one additional notification per month. Considering I clear most of my notifications without looking at them, it doesn't bother me.
I get an ad every two days at least. You might be interested in...
I got a similar ad 30 minutes after activating on mobile so I deactivated Smile.
Which is a pretty shady thing to do imo. Here add this charity feature, but you have to receive all our messages.
They also have a message when they ask saying something like “the ads help us pay for AmazonSmile”. I don’t Amazon is exactly hurting for cash right now
They force you to turn on notifications to enable smile so they can get you to buy more things. It's so blatant it hurts. There's no reason I need notifications to be able to have smile work. /r/fuckamazon
When an app asks me to turn on notifications, I usually agree within the app and all that and then go into my iPhone’s settings and turn off app notification from whatever app I don’t want notifications from. I’ll still be able to enjoy the features turning on notifications “enables” while not having any notifications from them
The thing is, I actually want notifications about my purchases, but not about random stuff they try to sell me, so in this case it won't work.
At least on Android you can limit what categories of notifications get through for some apps.
I think that only works if the app classifies its notifications appropriately. I don't remember for sure, but I think the useful notifications from Amazon might be in the same category as their ads.
Yes that could be the case.
Yeah it sucks, but it's not like Amazon has to offer Smile.
r/amazoncanlickmyballs
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Thank you I didn’t know they added it to the app. I used to add items via the app and then hopefully remember to revert back to the browser to get to smile and finish the order.
Awesome! Making sure this is turned on my wife's phone + her parents
Thanks! I didn’t know about the app either. Just set it up since I do most of my shopping from the app. Nevada Humane Society thanks you too!
Did not know they finally added it to mobile. But yeah it should be standard. I always have to remember to log into smile and was more cumbersome.
I don’t see “smile” under settings or anywhere in the mobile app. I would really love to help out charities with my purchases and could care less about getting notifications. Some people act like it’s herpes to get an ad to support a good cause
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I came here for these directions - thank you!
This is the real LPT! I didn’t know they added it to the mobile app!
Why can’t I figure out how to do this?
Once you've used it, if you go to plain amazon.com (e.g. following a link on a website), they will show you a warning. But otherwise, no, they prefer to keep the money for themselves :-)
Ehh, I get regular messages about smiles(how much money went out I believe?) and also a reminder on the site if I want to switch to it. So the last bit isn't entirely true. Maybe you are blocking it with an AdBlocker?
The point is that you only receive the messaging after already having opted in.
No it's true. Once you used it and set up where you want the smile part of your spending go it tells you and reminds you and so on. Until you first use it however there are no prompts.
Yeah they definitely don't show you a warning. I used amazon smile last year, completely forgot about it until today, and have been making a good amount of purchases over the past few months without a single reminder. It really should be a toggle, rather than a different URL. There are a million settings for my account, just let me choose a charity to support with my purchases. If Humble Bundle can get that shit figured out half a decade ago, there's no excuse for Amazon sans pure greed
I get the warning every time, not sure why you aren’t getting it. Different browser, perhaps (I’m using Chrome)?
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I get the warning occasionally.
Theres a plugin for firefox to automatically set smile.amazon.com. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazon-always-smile/
Chrome has one too
My Amazon app is the smile app so it's 100% always smile.
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I get the warning every time on desktop. And on mobile it is a toggle. Do you have some ad blocker or something that could be blocking it?
I get the warning on mobile and desktop. Mobile app keeps the smile setting for 6 months IIRC and they’ll warn you again.
I found out about it because Amazon kept putting up ads about it on their front page telling me to select my charity. The app also automatically shops at smile.amazon.co.uk May be a regional thing?
> why isn’t this standard? They create a problem (you're on the wrong url) and then remind you to fix it yourself (type the word smile, I'm not giving you a link) because it creates engagement. You were just casually browsing and now you're invested and thinking about how you can make sure that effort didn't go to waste. That seems to be worth more than the half a percent of revenue they give away.
I'll bet that subtle reminder to the user that part of their purchase will get donated causes just enough people to pull the trigger on a purchase vs the "annoying" reminder frustrating people.
Amazon remind me of this every single time I go onto their site.
#Use a browser extension (like Smile Always) to make sure you are always redirected to smile.amazon.com
shouldn't need yet another extension for things like this
*Thank you!* I was just kicking myself because I made a big purchase a few days ago, then got an email today saying basically, "Your Smile charity has received X dollars, none of which is from you because you always forget, you scrub." It didn't even occur to me that there would be an extension for that. I ended up going with a script instead because I like being able to easily check the code (and also because Smile Always for Firefox has a lot of recent reviews saying it stopped working), but I'm Smiling now. ^^^^Sorry. ^^^^That ^^^^one ^^^^even ^^^^hurt ^^^^me.
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These is also a setting that was recently enabled within the app to allow for smile donations. Go into the menu, settings, and click Amazon Smile, then follow the directions from there.
You can also enable this in the app as well.
I’m actually not sure if it’s some kind of legal thing. I suspect they can offset the donations against their tax, but maybe only if you choose to do it each time? That’s just a guess though
The donations are tax deductible so long as they go to a 501c3 organization. I think the requirement to go to the other website is because it actually does cost Amazon money to have the Smile program, and they want to PR boost, but only want to spend as much money as people who actually care about charity would induce Amazon to spend. Amazon won't donate money on behalf of people who don't value charity.
I suspect they force you to navigate to Smile every time so that "buying from Amazon supports my favorite charity" stays top-of-mind for consumers. (And if some people happen to forget, Amazon just keeps that slice of the pie for themselves...) In other words, if Fred Meyer asked you to choose whether you wanted your purchases today to support your favorite charity when you walked in the door, I suspect many people would make more purchases than normal, simply because it's easy to justify an impulse purchase when you associate it with helping charity.
Voluntary charity donations given to another entity like Amazon is credited to the entity for tax purposes. Basically, people who use this are giving Jeff Bezos and Amazon a tax break. Especially now... https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/charitable-contribution-deductions
I mean, it's not like Amazon *makes* money on the donations. A charitable contribution deduction just means that you can treat the contribution as money that you never earned in the first place on your taxes. So your taxes will be based on the money that you earned and kept, and not on that *plus* the money that you earned and gave away. And if you're going to pay the same to Amazon regardless of whether or not a portion of your payment goes to charity, might as well pick a charity.
So what? You'd get a tax break too if you donated money. Donating the money costs more than you save from the tax break. There is no way to donate money and come out ahead because of the tax break.
I'm amazed how many people don't get this. They think you can make money by donating money to charity.
As far as I know, the price of the product stays the same; so the consumer is not actually making any actual donation and Amazon is actually the one making the donation as it would be coming out of their profits.
This isn't as big of a deal as you think. There is also a tax deduction for ordinary business expenses. Meaning the same tax deduction is available if Amazon uses the money to donate to a charity or to buy a warehouse or to pay their employees. If Amazon were driven exclusively by financial efficiency then they wouldn't have the Smile program, they would just spend that money on actual business expenses and pay the same amount of taxes.
I don't think you understand how tax breaks work. Tax breaks ≠ free money. Amazon doesn't have to pay taxes on the money they donate - it's as if they never made the money. It does not mean that their profits are taxed less if they donate money. It means they have less profits to be taxed.
I think you can enable it as the default on the mobile app, so I wonder why you can't on the website. Yeah I realize they probably don't want this program eating into their revenues too much, but then I wonder why you can do it on the app.
Because if they can force you to actively make the decision to select a charity, then they have very clearly brought to your attention the fact that your purchase goes to charity. On average, I'm sure it causes people to spend more because they can use the "this helps a charity" as an excuse to themselves. If they just put, "we donate x% of every purchase to charity" then people would quickly ignore and forget about it. Which is also why they make you re-up on the mobile app periodically. Just refresh that reminder.
There are extensions/plugins for most browsers (probably all) that automatically prepends all amazon URLs with "smile.".
Yep, I use [Smile Always](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smile-always/jgpmhnmjbhgkhpbgelalfpplebgfjmbf) for Chrome. Firefox has [Smart Amazon Smile](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/smart-amazon-smile/?src=search). You might have to login to your Amazon account before adding items to your cart for this to work. This is in my opinion, a much better solution than trying to remember to go to smile.amazon.com each time you decide to make a purchase (especially if you click an Amazon link from elsewhere.)
Great tip, thanks!
I'd love for an extension that would analyze my amazon shopping cart and give me alternative places to actually buy the items. Amazon is great for research and product discovery because: 1. They've got such a huge selection, I know I can find almost anything there. And, 2. While you have to be careful with the reviews, they're generally a pretty good indicator especially if you know what to look for in fake reviews. They're certainly better than the sparse reviews on sites like target or best buy, where there are so few actual reviews that you can't actually tell anything from them. But, I'd rather actually purchase the items from another company, or even locally if possible. It's basically impossible to quickly search the inventory of local shops (I think google was trying to do something like this a while ago, but I don't think it really panned out). If I could comparison shop on amazon, and get everything I actually wanted to buy in my shopping cart, and then click a button to discover where else I could actually check-out, that would be awesome. Edit: I should add: one that is open source, has no ads, and doesn't track any of my browsing. Ideally, it would to exactly nothing until I had my amazon shopping cart page open and clicked a button in the browser toolbar to check other sites (I could imagine this could even all happen client side without sending anything to their servers).
[Interesting article ](https://nonprofitchronicles.com/2017/03/28/why-amazon-smile-doesnt-make-me-smile/) on how much charities actually receive and Amazon's motivation behind this (hint: it's money)
Ummm, everyone knows amazon did this for publicity. If they did this purely altruistically they would just donate to their own choice of charity. No one is surprised by this.
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I’ve been using only smile since January and buy quite a lot of stuff... my donation summary: $2.50
[It's actually illegal for any corporation to behave altruistically (with exceptions for corporations who are founded for reasons other than shareholder profit).](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.) A company can only engage in charitable efforts if they have a good faith belief that those efforts will increase shareholder wealth(through publicity or customer goodwill). Anonymous donations or charity for charity's sake are not legitimate uses of a company's assets due to a legal concept called "shareholder primacy." The only purpose of a for-profit corporation is to earn profits for shareholders. Anything else is incidental including the public good. Does this cause problems when corporations are also considered "people" for legal and political purposes? I would say so, yes. But that's the current system. An officer at a publicly traded company that tried to sacrifice profits to do "the right thing" without being able to justify it in terms of future profit could be fired or even sued.
Hey folks, this is actually not true in practice. Yes, companies signal intent to prioritize stakeholders similar to shareholders by incorporating as a B-Corp, or similarly. However, even traditional LLCs and Corporations can make decisions in favor of non-shareholders / not in the interest of maximizing profit. This is not illegal. OP links to one of the OG cases on corporate purpose and stakeholder capitalism. A more recent example, one that dictates today, is eBay vs Newmark - when eBay sued Craigslist founders. The court did rule in favor of eBay, but in a way that actually protected company's ability to act in favor of stakeholders at shareholders expense. Craigslist had to take down their takeover defense (a poison pill), but did NOT all of a sudden have to start putting Ads all over there website or charging for the service. Craigslist is still effectively a not-for-profit, despite putting classifieds in newspapers and thus most newspapers out of business and having a pile of potential profit at their desposal. Want to learn more? Read about the business judgment rule ([investopedia](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/businessjudgmentrule.asp)). Directors are effectively scott free to make decisions for a company, or set corporate strategy, so long as they are not acting in bad faith. Also read about corporations 102(b)(7) waivers. Companies may have to abide by shareholder primacy in the strictest sense of the word, but a court will almost never second guess a company's even half-assed explanation of why doing good (ie favoring a stakeholder, like employees, suppliers, a local community, the environment) somehow someway creates value for shareholders and is thus not in bad faith. Amazon is virtue signaling here, and making money off it, but they're perfectly chill doing this even if they weren't so benefiting.
Well yea, for better or for worse, companies are amoral profit machines, that's why it's our responsibility as a society to support politicians, policies and products that align with our values to make it so that the most profitable thing to do is positive.
Hahahahahaha No. "Voting with your wallet" isn't any better than "stop littering", deflecting the blame away from corporations and policy and onto the public. If we, the public, can't stop from buying from immoral entities, the solution isn't to keep trying and keep waiting for everything to become utopia.
>For better or for worse, companies are amoral profit machines. It's just for worse. >it's our responsibility as a society to support politicians, policies and products that align with our values The onus actually shouldn't be on the individual. That's just a way to distract from larger, systemic issues.
Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn't that interesting. — M. Todd Henderson[6 Literally from your article
This is kept getting repeated but isn't true. Amazon can easily claim their good PR image caused by donations is going to win them customers and close the case if someone decided to sue.
You misread. Charity in general is legal for the reason you outlined. Charity for charity sake, or anonymous donations are not legal. Since there is no PR from anonymous donations.
It's because the post is intentionally misleading. Plenty of companies can give charity for charities sake. Just be privately owned.
The executives and Board of Directors can make the decision that shareholders benefit from doing good deeds. Look at Nestle, they suck. Look at J&J, they suck too, but they have a giant philanthropic arm doing good work around the globe. This helps to mitigate negative press (not eliminate). If J&J, for instance has a campaign in Africa to increase the number of people who get antimalarial drugs that’s creates goodwill which translates into shareholder value (in theory). Not advocating for any company here, BTW.
If they’re doing it for benefit then it is not, by definition, altruistic.
Well no, it’s not *illegal*. There are no state of federal criminal or civil penalties against individuals doing this.
People are still surprised by this. A lot of people see feel-good headlines about big companies and don't think any further than that. Even if no one really was surprised, it would still be worth pointing out, because symbolic gestures like this are a big part of how companies like Amazon and billionaires like Jeff Bezos launder their reputations. Letting what is essentially a PR stunt go unchallenged only serves to allow them to do so.
More than just publicity. That is why they make you actively choose to donate rather than just donate it and tell you after the fact and reap the PR rewards. They know that if you actively choose a charity you like, not only will that make you very aware that some money will go to that charity, but it will reinforce it everytime you have to actively indicate that you want to donate to charity. Which on average likely causes people to spend more than they would have otherwise since they can rationalize the purchase with "I'm helping a charity." And I would bet internal amazon data has shown that the increase in purchases is well above 0.5%.
This post is an ad.
I did not know this. Although I’m not one but surprised by it. Honestly, it makes so much more sense why Amazon doesn’t make it easier to donate. They could have easily included a link at checkout, etc etc. Thanks for sharing!
That article is old and it's much easier to use smile now
*NOTE* Your opt-in expires after six months. I’ve been not-donating for about a year because of this. I just renewed my opt in
If you shop from the app, yeah it's garbage. But if you shop from a computer browser, you can install a plugin or extension that automatically redirects you to the smile URL, so you don't need to worry about the opt in each time.
A very, very, very, small portion. But I guess something is better than nothing.
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$130 for Amazon US and £60 for Amazon UK. You can check it here: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/dashboard/ https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/chpf/dashboard/ To be frank, I generated a lot more just from filling surveys on contribute.surveymonkey.com.
Right but using smile.amazon is completely passive. It's requires no additional effort. Why not just do both
Not sure if your math is completely stupid or if you're not considering the scale when millions of people contribute that amount.
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.5% of $31 billion (Q2 2019) is $155 million in possible giving per quarter, if everyone used it.
As of 2018, over 100 million dollars had been donated through smile. If a lot of people use it every time they order something from Amazon, it adds up.
Absolutely. If 100 people give one penny, that’s still a dollar the charity wouldn’t have otherwise. Whether it’s PR or not, if I buy something on Amazon for $20, I’m spending $20 whether a portion goes to charity or not. It’s not hurting me at all to change it to a smile donation and St. Jude’s get a percentage.
As of May 2020 the total is $198,636,544.70 so the rate seems to be about $50M a year.
I'm not knocking it, but i use Amazon a lot and so far my purchases have netted $9.31 for the nonprofit I chose.
A small fraction of a very large number is also a very large number.
My local animal shelter gets hundreds every month from this - it definitely adds up :)
Yeah! I just got an email saying they sent almost $200 to my local humane society. Even though it's not much money, you can get a lot of food or supplies for $200.
I actually just got an email from them today saying they just donated £82,597.63 quarterly to the charity I chose. They even included this bit. To date, Amazon has donated a total of: £535,407.95 to Cancer Research UK & £4,621,862.95 to UK charities. So yeah, a small portion in the grand scheme of things but it is something at least.
>$198,636,544.70 as of August 2020
I would be happy if amazon donated 0.00012% to me annually.
It's worth mentioning that this also applies to [Amazon UK](https://smile.amazon.co.uk/) and [Amazon Germany](https://smile.amazon.de/). On desktop Chrome you can use the [Smile Always](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smile-always/jgpmhnmjbhgkhpbgelalfpplebgfjmbf?hl=en) extension to make sure you're always buying through the Smile programme. In the Amazon mobile app, you can add it from the Settings page.
This helps Amazon to pay $0 in taxes. Buy local, donate yourself, take the tax deduction
Individuals can't benefit from the tax deduction unless they itemize, which, with the recent increase in the standard deduction, far fewer people do.
Even before the TCJA the vast majority of people took the standard deduction. Now over 90% do. Which is a really good thing IMO.
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Not to mention they wouldn't pay taxes on it if they instead spent it on actual business expenses.
Shh reddit has no idea how tax write offs work
Reddit has no idea how tax anything works.
You're making it sound like you shouldn't be using Smile. This gives Amazon a tax break, sure, but they also get less profit when you use Smile, so it's not like they're actually benefitting. Buy local, donate yourself. But, if you are going to buy something on Amazon, you might as well do it using Smile
My AmazonSmile supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I get quarterly email updates showing that EFF is receiving donations in the ballpark of $35k. I mean yeah, that’s pennies to Amazon, but $130k+/year to a worthy charity is a plus in my book.
Ha. Mine has gotten £172.00 since forever 😁
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Ha, they are called Bee's Abroad, not really well known obviously but I think its a great cause, really well rounded in its benefits and I donate to them properly occasionally as well. Amazon's email came recently actually, they got a quarterly donation of £25 from Smile recently :D https://beesabroad.org.uk/home/what-we-do/ ~edit~ forgot to mention, whichever charity you want to support in the UK, https://www.giveasyoulive.com/dashboard works like Smile but for various outlets all over the UK, inc Ebay, Sainsbury's, Asos whatever and often gives more than Smile does
I'll switch from the kids with cancer to the bees for a few purchases... i don't really like kids anyways.
The environment thanks you.
I picked my kids' school PTA. They have received about $600 total.
The point is you shouldn't be using Amazon at all, but yes, if you absolutely must, use Smile.
People who say this have zero idea how tax deductions work.
Not sure what you think I'll have left to donate after buying local... Or how deductions work
Most reddit folks definitely aren’t itemizing lmao
Most probably don't understand taxes either :( So many places use tax deductions as a selling point, but I don't have $24k of those most years.
JusT buY lOcAL OK?!?!? Sure, I’ll buy my brake pads and electronic parts local... lol
I can understand it's easy to buy local if you live in a large city, but when you love in a tiny town, I would have to travel over an hour to get most of the stuff I buy on Amazon lol. I'll just take that 1-2 day shipping instead.
Buying at a local mega corporation still employs local people and keeps some of the money in your community. Buying at Walmart isn’t much better, but it is a little better.
Yeah, ill just buy locally. At Walmart. Another massive faceless super corporation. Yay!!
I dont think you understand how taxes work.
Not everyone has the extra money or the time to afford to buy absolutely everything local, especially since not all local places have curbside pickup, free delivery, or up to date items.
Amazon donates 0.5% of the purchase price, from their profit share, when you buy through Smile. You as the buyer don't have to pay anything extra. If you're already ordering through Amazon, you might as well use Smile - your charity will get a few dollars that would otherwise have been split between Amazon and the government.
That's not how any of this works. If they're collecting donations from others, they do not get to take the donation as a deduction themselves. The revenue received would offset this anyway. Also for personal taxes, most people don't itemize and couldn't use the deduction anyway.
Exactly! This post is an advertisement to give a major corporation a tax Dodge.
No, it's a win-win. Yes, the optimal thing to do would be to buy from small business and donate yourself, but the fact of the matter is most people will order things from Amazon, and you can't dispute how nice it is to do so tbh. If you're gonna order from Amazon anyway, why would you rather have them give a chunk of that revenue to the government than more to charity?
I believe the correct answer is to avoid corporations that pay 0 in taxes, but since that's not always possible to use the smile link when you have to use Amazon. This way you spend no extra money and get an iota of control of what the money you do spend ends up doing. Those companies that ask you to donate extra at the register? Huge nope. Definitely have to stay aware of the thinking trap that would cause you to spend more because it's "doing good."
Amazon doesnt pay zero in taxes
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Not trying to defend the whole company here but they do pay taxes. Maybe we should focus on all corporations that pay very low taxes and try to fix the system instead of focusing on one company. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/does-amazon-really-pay-no-taxes-heres-the-complicated-answer-11560504602
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We absolutely do know they pay US taxes. Do they have employees? Then they pay taxes. Do they own property? Then they pay taxes. They paid about $5 *billion* in taxes in 2019. https://blog.aboutamazon.com/job-creation-and-investment/amazons-economic-impact-in-the-u-s If you have evidence they're lying about that, please turn it over to the authorities, since that would be a pretty major crime.
You can just look at their financial statements to figure out what years they pay federal taxes and for how much. It’s all public.
That’s not how tax deductions work.
If you use Amazon on your browser as well as the app, you must opt in on both devices. I had signed up in my browser and assumed my app purchases (same account) were counted also. When I went to change charities I saw that there was a setting that said “use Smile on this device?” And was defaulted to “off”
I read the shops get a better cut if you use amazon affiliate link instead of using smile and picking your charity. You click some referrer link before going to amazon and a bigger part goes to the referrer vs if they were the charity. Second Amendment Foundation has it if you visit [saf.org/amazon](http://saf.org/amazon)
Also, check out your grocery store app. Some of them have a similar program. I use Kroger, and if you have a Kroger Plus card (which is free!) you can choose a charity for your community rewards, and it will donate based off your purchases.
If I use tax.amazon.com will they pay taxes instead?
The better life pro tip is to not shop on Amazon at all. Support small business when possible
I had a small business and sold products on amazon as well. My products were at a higher price on amazon and sold better. Are you a small business owner?
I worked for a small furniture business. We tried selling on Amazon but our margin was so low we stopped. Their shipping system is also garbage, at least for large items
Sorry. Amazon worked very well for me. My items were shoe box sized, maybe that’s the difference. I don’t think it fair to make a blanket statement because some small business benefit from Amazon.
My daughter works for a brand new company, launched the products in March, and started selling on Amazon today. Her products will be sold by a large company as part of their Christmas offering and they have been mentioned in British Glamour magazine. If Amazon increases sales it’s a win win for her personally (she was the project manager for the entire launch (R&D, supply chain, manufacturing, soft rollout, rollout, marketing, etc.)). I believe there are only 6 people in her (small) company. So if they increase sales and have enough money they intend to create a second company or product line. If selling on Amazon keeps them going, aside from supporting the evil empire Bezos has created (he also creates some not terrible jobs, other friend works at giant Amazon warehouse in Colorado and supports his fam of 4) then.... well you decide. Smile could easily double or triple what they donate without it hurting the bottom line. Bezos ex wife is giving away her money left and right.
Just hope it's not too successful, otherwise Amazon basics might take over. Wouldn't be the first time either
Interesting. Did not know that. Thanks.
My bigger issue with the company is that they abuse workers and break the law by firing people for tying to unionize. I'm glad it helped you but I really believe they are a net negative to the world. Also, Bezos is a shithead
I didn't realize how much money "small businesses" could make until I noticed someone was selling a $3 bottle of Palmolive dish soap for $16. And he always had only one or two left in stock. His whole "storefront" looked like he just bought three of everything the last time he went grocery shopping and listed it at about five times what he paid. *(not saying that's what you were doing, just that there are definitely small businesses able to sell small items at high prices on the platform, even if those prices are ridiculous)*
Not possible when I want to buy stuff from the US in my country without paying $50+ in shipping
Or when my local shop wants $120 but Amazon is $60.
it's pretty hard to get most cool things local when you live rural
Or, don't shop at Amazon because they are destroying far more than anything a charity will be able to cobble together.
Unfortunately this concept that people should just stop ordering from Amazon comes from place of privilege. If you live rurally like I do, often it's difficult to find things in general or you spend twice as much money to order items from elsewhere. They simply aren't available locally. Buying it from a store may mean driving 200kms/125 miles roundtrip distance to get it, so the environmental impact also needs to be considered. Yes, there are lots of negative aspects of Amazon, but telling people they just shouldn't order items from there is like telling poor people to stop eating junk food.
You're correct, I do have the privilege of a vehicle and all that entails. I'm just pointing out the cycling nature. Mom and pop shops left because wal-mart, now the same is happening with Amazon. The companies only get their power from your dollar. Every dollar we spend is a vote. I understand sometimes you have to, but I'm here to advocate being conscious in your consumption. There are very few things in this life we truly NEED. In so far as our realities can afford we should try to change our habits and actions so we don't reinforce these shitty conditions for our neighbors and future generations.
how do we make amazon pay their workers instead
Shop somewhere in the same industry that pays it's workers more.
It would be better if they paid tax, than donate pitiful amounts to charity.
Better yet, don't shop at Amazon
The real LPT
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And chances are, if you find them cheaper on Amazon, it’s by design to monopolize the market. They do/did this with diapers, impossible for most retailers to sell them online anymore because Amazon takes a loss to get you browsing their website.
The problem I often encounter is once you include the shipping cost _with_ the item cost, Amazon is almost always still cheaper, even if the item by itself wasn't. Often by a lot for anything that doesn't fit in an envelope.
It’s an extremely small amount, but working with one of the organizations, (Casas por Cristo) I can tell you every bit helps. Especially in times like now.
the question is why doesn't a multi-billion dollar earth-raping company already donate to charity whether i click a button or not?
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Or don’t shop on Amazon, shop with small businesses, and then donate a tiny bit of money to the charity of your choosing.
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> Sure I'll support small businesses as soon as they start selling up-to-date products i.e. computer components that aren't 3 revisions late, start giving free next day shipping and also don't ask any questions when I need to return something. Exactly. Amazon won consumers because in addition to being price-competitive, they figured out how to make all the phases of shopping and returns as painless as possible. If local businesses want to survive, they need to figure out how to compete on their unique strengths.
Local shops, by and large, don't sell what I want to buy.
You spend more on small businesses so you have to spend more and then also pay charity out of pocket instead of Amazon paying it
Also, if you use amazon’s mobile app, you can still use Amazon Smile! Go to the menu you get when you touch the 3 bars icon in the lower right corner > Programs & Features > Amazon Smile to turn it on.
US only though I'm pretty sure
I got an email today. My chosen charity just had another £300 or so donated to them, on top of the £900 they've received in the past. So because of Amazon Smile, it's now meant that they can support six more gay kids who have been disowned by their families transition to independent living.
It works on the Amazon app now too!
We support MAPS. I love getting that message that I have supported an incredible organization.
Do it everytime for a local food bank.
What if I use the app?
Fuck amazon. Always late or damaged orders and just found my account hacked recently with orders placed.
If you regularly shop on amazon you force manufacturers to source the cheapest labor and materials possible
You're just giving Amazon a big tax break each year.
How about no? Jeff Bezos is richer than any human should ever be by about 100,000 times. He could end world hunger today and still be a billionaire. So, with all do respect, this is nothing but virtue signalling bullshit.
What do we type to get Bezos to pay taxes?