231–240 of 581 posts
I’m honestly surprised it even lasted so long.
Anyway, there are plenty of alternatives to amazon (that aren’t more expensive or just slightly more expensive) that aren’t as morally bankrupt as amazon is. I’d encourage you to spend your money there instead :)
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…
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Totally this. Our company had a diversity hiring initiative and I wanted to do some outreach in our area so I reached out about sponsoring an LGBTQ+ event. As a primary sponsor on the bill, my anticipation was that our goodwill gesture would go a good distance in the community and we should leave it at that, but HQ wanted a signup sheet with us trying to get people’s info for recruiting and numbers to publish for the…
IMO the best thing you can do is reaching out to high school teachers teaching programming. A coworker had an interested high school student come in for the day/week a few times, and shadow them. For many kids whose parents have never heard of white collar work, it can be life changing to have a good impression.
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.
But likewise, in a couple of years I've only generated about ten dollars worth and I make at least a couple of purchases a week.
0.5% of net just isn't very much on low priced items.
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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.
Are you saying that e.g. homelessness in America has not been solved because the organizations working on it are not trying to solve it?
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> …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.
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.
Was it impossible on the ".com" app? It works perfectly on the ".co.uk" for me on Android. But likewise, in a couple of years I've only generated about ten dollars worth and I make at least a couple of purchases a week. 0.5% of net just isn't very much on low priced items.
I can’t currently find anything about it in the app. Either it has already been removed or its very difficult to find.
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I've personally used chrome extension "Smile Always". It automatically converts all amazon links to amazon smile links. This is sad. I am currently at $417.30 in donations to my local charity. Amazon is in denial if they think this hasnt had an impact.
I don’t so much think it doesn’t have an impact, as much nothing on the list has any PR pizzazz. $316.62 to a grade school? Lame. $100,000 novelty check to a board member’s favorite charity that happens to be run by his son? Now that’s pizzazz with a capital P!
Facebook adverts picking random local charities and showing how much they've raised is far better, run them on amazon's front page too.
The local hospice I choose has raised £3k via amazon smile. That's far better PR than them giving £1m novelty cheques to some remote city based charity.
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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.
Points go towards charity?
Like airline miles. You can convince yourself that X number of miles is "worth" $10k because they let you fly business class to Asia. In reality you don't value that flight at $10k because you wouldn't pay $10k to fly business class if you didn't have the points.