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Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

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Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#151

Post by javajosh »

iambateman wrote: post #14

The fun part of Amazon Smile was that it let customers decide how they wanted to change the world…but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. 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 wer…

>This is surprisingly honest for corporatespeak

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.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#152

Post by wombatpm »

indrora wrote: post #96
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. 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…

Amazon has been historically very stingy with their donations. 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 o…

And the smile program was another example of that. Had to use the correct url or nothing went to charity. They could have made it a setting for the user, or an option during checkout.

I bet if the offered round up for charity in the checkout process the funds collected would dwarf those raised by the smile program.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#153

Post by gnicholas »

neodymiumphish wrote: post #42
gnicholas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would often forget to type "smile" when searching for stuff, but then I'd just add to cart, close the window, and go to my cart via smile. That seemed to work. 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.

They actually might. Whatever the overhead was in managing and tracking payments to that many charities based on payments from that many customers had to be significant. Instead, they could just throw 50 mil across the top 10 each year and not have to deal with managing the smile program anymore.

I imagine there could be ways to make their philanthropic donations more efficient. What I'm saying is I doubt they are actually going to donate this amount, and achieve greater impact (however that is measured). I imagine they are going to launch programs that they were already going to launch, donating to whatever charities they favor for other reasons. For example, if they're building a new office somewhere, they can give a bunch of money to charities in that community, to build goodwill in the community.

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.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#154

Post by therealcamino »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #73
iambateman wrote: post #14

The fun part of Amazon Smile was that it let customers decide how they wanted to change the world…but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. 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 wer…

> …but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. 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…

Or, a more cynical take is that I only seemed to get reminders to go to smile.amazon.com if I had arrived via an affiliate link. I always suspected that it was a money-saving strategy, that if I clicked the reminder and arrived at smile.amazon.com, that maybe they wouldn't have to pay the affiliate commission. But I never looked into it at all, so that was just my pure speculation.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#155

Post by Zanni »

anikom15 wrote: post #92
gretch wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just look at other companies. 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/fund…

Sorry, I don’t really understand what you’re talking about. 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.

I suspect that saving the cost of managing AmazonSmile is the primary motivator. That's a lot of overhead! Two thousand pages of charities, most of which are collecting less than $30. I'd bet there are hundreds, if not thousands, of charities that Amazon was paying more to manage collection/disbursement than the actual charity received. (Or maybe not--there seems to be a minimum payout of $5.00, starting on page 1881.)

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#156

Post by SoftTalker »

jzb wrote: post #77
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. 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…

But smaller organizations will be missed entirely. My charity is a cat shelter in St. Louis. I’d rather they get my cut than a larger charity that means less to me and has bigger fundraising machinery.

Yes and small charities like this are generally volunteer-run and a very high percentage of their income goes to their charitiable purpose.

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.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#157

Post by culi »

bumby wrote: post #142
culi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tomato tomato

Tomato potato You might be confusing correlation as something more substantive

the point is there's not really a way for us to tell which is the "substance". It's all just correlations and it's all just a matter of what aspect you choose to highlight

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#158

Post by jen20 »

wombatpm wrote: post #152
indrora wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has been historically very stingy with their donations. 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 o…

And the smile program was another example of that. Had to use the correct url or nothing went to charity. They could have made it a setting for the user, or an option during checkout. I bet if the offered round up for charity in the checkout process the funds collected would dwarf those raised by the smile program.

Was it even possible to do in the app?

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#159

Post by freeAgent »

beders wrote: post #146

> However, after almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations—more than 1 million globally—our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin. What BS is this? Can we have the real reason?

I assume this will simply allow them to increase their margins by eliminating what was, essentially, their special affiliate program for charities.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#160

Post by shusaku »

myvoiceismypass wrote: post #147
shusaku wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checking my account right now: I generated $2.86, and my charity received $399.79. Yay for being average I guess! 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.

Where can you see this detail in one's amazon account?

Go to smile.amazon.com, scroll to the bottom of the page, and you should see “Your AmazonSmile”. Click on that.
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