I’m not defending Amazon here because I don’t think they are doing it for the right reasons, but I wonder if direct donations to charities might actually go up enough to more than compensate for this change. I was ashamed recently when I learned how little the charity I support was actually getting from the Smile program. The Smile program let me feel good about supporting the charity while remaining woefully ignorant of how little the charity was getting in return. If I donate directly, I will know more acutely how much (or how little) good I am doing.
Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
161–170 of 581 posts
Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They could have simply raised their minimum to a number that covered the overhead.
Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
#163The 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 less cynical take is that they really can have more impact by focusing on fewer charities.
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.
Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
#164It's a shame this is closing. I love this program and more importantly, our local school PTO is a beneficiary and will feel the loss of this program.
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.
Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is exactly right. I help run a small local non-profit makerspace, and donations through Smile help keep the space open and free, without a membership fee.
How much was the makerspace getting from Smile, if you can answer that?
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...
Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
#166Earlier 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…
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.
The whole point of affiliate links is that they're generating sales that wouldn't have existed without- it is essentially an incentive for people to advertise for Amazon in organic ways. Whether the money goes to the affiliate or the smile program at that point wouldn't really make much difference, and actively undermining the people who post affiliate links seems like it would be a stereotypically idiotic corporate split brain thing to do.
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.
Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
#167Earlier 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…
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.
I use a greasemonkey script that removes all affiliate links and specifically goes to smile.amazon.com so I don't have to think about it.
Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
#168No need to be sad, though. Look at what Amazon donated to your charity from your purchases, then just go give that amount directly to them next year. And then quit buying on Amazon. Everyone wins!
This is basically it. Prime has gone to absolute shit (Walmart and Target beat them on delivery AND quality now), and this may have been the last thing keeping me on the platform.
what's up with shipping, it's so inconsistent. Are they testing their customers patience or something? It's getting to the point where I'm considering starting a spreadsheet to quantify how poor the experience has been of late.
Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
#169The 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…
No I had my own preferred charity which was part of the smile program. It just seems a bad customer experience taking away a feature that myself and others cherished in Amazon prime. Another wrong decision.
Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
SPLC, like most non-profits, is a scam https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-reckoning-of-mo...
I can't decide which is funnier, the fact that you think a fifteen-year-old experience is relevant now, or the fact they had to update the story multiple times because the author kept getting facts wrong. Not exactly a slam dunk on backing up the "most non-profits are a scam" claim.
Huh? The article is less than three years old; nothing but the first and last few paragraphs focus on the author's 15-year-old experience; and the couple of corrections at the end were fairly trivial, especially for such a long article.