Amazon Closing AmazonSmile • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#221

Post by boomboomsubban » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:22 AM UTC

grantc wrote: post #187

boomboomsubban wrote: post #127

Canceling the program bothers me a little, but replacing it with "donating" to four in house charities, only two of which are properly labeled as such, that clearly help Amazon makes it so much worse. 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 fo…

The 20,000 families benefitting from housing in the Seattle metro area as a result of Amazon's investments in the community might define charitable vs. non-charitable differently than you. I've personally met the women and children benefitting from the $100M Amazon and its employees have donated to Mary's Place -- their lens is not yours. Your comments about AFE are a bit underdeveloped. File under no good deed goes…

Building houses is a good thing, but you could make the project a for profit division of Amazon and I don't think what they're doing would drastically change.

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.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#222

Post by Krasnol » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:37 AM UTC

nicklevin wrote: post #2

There were seemingly odd hoops for customers to jump through to have their purchases qualify for Smile. Didn't type in the 'smile' URL? Too bad, no donation for you. One of the oddest was requiring push notifications in order for mobile purchases to count ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233815 ).

This is the main reason why I think that they never took this serious and never actually wanted many people to use it.

A switch in your profile which would default you to smile shouldn't have been such a big problem for a company like Amazon.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#223

Post by irrational » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:37 AM UTC

Well, crap. Often when I had a choice of where to purchase something, I would go with Amazon to support my chosen charity. Amazon is crazy thinking this won’t impact them negatively.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#224

Post by webworker » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:47 AM UTC

Darn. I used to do smile and have the donations sent to haiku.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#225

Post by irrational » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:50 AM UTC

vwcx wrote: post #24

It's amazing to look at the AmazonSmile form 990. It's a 2000 page pdf with a list of every charity that received a donation along with the amount: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/46262...

Electronic Frontier Foundation and code.org were the 13th and 14th orgs with the most money donated.

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.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#226

Post by snailmailman » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:52 AM UTC

Sad, but not super surprising to be honest. Their metric about average donation amount being low isn’t surprising to me at all. In my opinion smile was always difficult to use. Why wasn’t it automatic? Why was it impossible to use through the mobile app?

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.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#227

Post by MrStonedOne » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:54 AM UTC

fnordpiglet wrote: post #64

Amazon doesn’t have any employee match programs, but they had AmazonSmile. This matched their Customer Obsession leadership principle in a very smart way. Rather than making their charitable giving be directed by a foundation or employees, it let customers decide what mattered to them. They highlight their charitable programs as a way of justifying the end of the Smile program. But those existed when Smile existed. I…

[dead]

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#228

Post by theGnuMe » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:57 AM UTC

Wow… Amazon must really be hurting to cut something like this off… maybe they need to ask Mackenzie for some money.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#229

Post by aksss » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:58 AM UTC

Amazon probably would just rather direct its own charitable giving than manage an allow/block list and field complaints about why X is platformed and Y is not. This is why we can’t have nice things.

..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.

Re: Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

#230

Post by irrational » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:58 AM UTC

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…

Reading through the list, I see planned parenthood listed many many times. Planned parenthood of Arizona, planned parenthood of Wisconsin, etc. I imagine if you added them all up, planned parenthood was getting a tidy sum of donations from Amazon smile.