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 were getting donations which were completely incongruent with Amazon’s moral sensibilities.
There’s no law saying they have to let customers pick, and this isn’t worth “outrage”, but I think it’s behavior which signals a lot about the way Amazon’s top leadership has shifted.
> …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 page 18. They made about $37.5 million in total donations that year. The top charity, the ASPCA, received $1.8 million that year (note that the ASPCA had total revenue of $267.7 million that year). But the main point is that the charity on the top of the second page, which is only about 100 charities from the top (ordered by total amount received) received just over $10,000, and the charity at the top of the third page received $5659. And there are still over 2100 pages of charities to go!
So it seems imminently reasonable to me that, rather than give a couple hundred bucks a year to thousands and thousands and thousands of charities, to instead consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good.
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.
> Name any large organization that has ever worked itself out of needing to exist.
This is an interesting take, but got me wondering, what organization _period_ has ever worked itself out of needing to exist? I'd love to hear examples.
California allocated 7 billion in 2022 to homelessness. There are 172,000 homeless in California. So that is $40,000 per homeless person, per year, in just state funds. Lot's of people keep a roof over their heads while making less money than that a year. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dude. There were 172,000 homeless people counted in one night.
Among those people, some were chronically homeless, which basically means mentally ill, disabled and/or addicted to something. Nobody is paying for housing and health care for these people for less than $40k per year.
The majority of those people, however, are not in that group. They also didn’t stay homeless all year - over the course of one year, many times that number were nearly homeless and got help from those funds to avoid it (pay back rent to avoid eviction, pay a deposit on a new place, etc), or used these funds for services while homeless - shelter, job training, medical care, assistance applying for disability payments, etc. Besides directly funding these services, the money was also spent in paying people to manage job training programs, run the shelters, be social workers who know how disability applications work, be social workers who have to find their homeless clients to tell them about work opportunities, track available spaces in rehab programs, ……………
Your attempted equivalency there is missing so much information that it is uselessly wrong.
I’m sure that the frontline workers for those organizations are earnest and genuine in their effort to help, but it’s also undoubtedly true that there’s a lot of money to be made (and it’s not really in the interest of those making the money to see the problem solved). If you search the term “homeless industrial complex”, you’ll see lots of hot takes on this. I’m not really endorsing any specific perspective, but I suspect that, as always, the truth is mixed and complex.
I said the truth is mixed and complex, not that it is "in the middle". The last few years provide examples of that which are as good as any other time.
"there's money to be made" is one of the weakest arguments there is. Capitalism makes it all about money! There's little doing without it.
This opinion can lead to some really ignorant statements (which I've heard before) :
- Full time jobs at charities? Money laundering for sure, they should reject their salary and starve.
- Investing in clean energy? A conspiracy, some people make money there.
- Recycling? People are paid to do it, it's a sham.
- Politician not forfeiting his salary? Corruption, they shouldn't make a living (or just take brides under the table).
"There's money to be made" isn't an argument. The world is not a binary, just because I am implying that some part of an industry is cronyism and grift, doesn't mean that I am asserting that it is 100% the case. It would be equally dumb to assert that it is 0%.
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.
Indeed. But these things tend to follow a log tale for benefit-to-charity and constant to increasing marginal costs. If it costs Amazon $2 in SMILE proceeds to donate $0.02 for a quarter, then it makes sense, if only for that particular charity, to not process it. This is independent of whether Amazon directly foots the bill or indirectly foots the bill via commitments and outlay portions of the SMILE allocations.
I'd encourage you to ask the shelter how much they get from Amazon Smile. My guess is it's $200-300 max, which is barely enough to save a single cat.
Worse, there is a well-known phenomenon [1] where if people's "guilt" is taken away, then they are less likely to donate overall. That is, for at least some portion of people, they probably mark a small charity as their Amazon Smile recipient and then think "Great, I'm donating to charity!", not realizing their donations are like 50 cents. But if they didn't sign up for Amazon Smile they might be more likely to actually donate a real amount.
To be clear, I'm all for small charities getting money, but I'd almost rather it be like a lottery or something so a smaller number of small charities could get money they could actually do something with.
I volunteer for a charity where each and every $500 donation supports a kid going through a program. That program regularly changes kids' life trajectories in a way that has a difficult to quantify multiplier effect throughout the community.
I am highly skeptical of wisdom of utilitarianism in charitable giving. No one has non-toy models so the math is all made up nonsense. More importantly, proximity between the giver and the recipient has profound agency effects that are completely ignored by most utilitarians. You tend to get better outcomes when you allow agents to center their personal projects, even if resources aren't optimally allocated when ignoring this "agent centering effect".
This. I am not a demographic utilitarians usually target. Despite that my family received support from government and charitable programs when I was a child. Without them I doubt I would have been able perform in school and ultimately get the job that I have today. Now I make enough money that I donate to charities.
Riffing on this: if you thought about charity in the "maximize social utility function" way that SV types tend to talk, wouldn't you suspect that Amazon Smile would also be an actually a good way of allocating charitable dollars? Or at least better than a megacorp picking and choosing? Markets work, wisdom of the crowds, and so on.
There's something very "early 21st century social trust crisis" about keeping the "capitalist utlitarianism" logos of neoliberalism while throwing out the "democratized decision making" ethos of neoliberalism.
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 HR team to show their money wasn’t just “thrown to the wind.” I got very cynical about doing events like that after that. It’s not really giving if you expect something in return.
Like, I get it, it’s not just a slush fund, but maybe it sort of should be. Does every dollar spent have to have clear ROI? Where’s the charity?
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 otherwise related to things that Jeff has a fiduciary tie to or where doing so was politically motivated to turn a blind eye to the rapid expansion of the Downtown/SLU Seattle Campus.
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.
Other large companies are similar. I worked for one multinational where they only allowed employee donation matching in narrow cases:
- certain large universities
- certain large hospitals
And that's it. I wrote to HR multiple times asking if my local health related charity could be part of their matching donations. Finally got a terse answer saying "no, only the ones on the list."
Some enterprises are so scared of anything remotely resembling controversy that they severely restrict matching, and others just don't offer it at all.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is fantastic about employee matching.
>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.
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.
not sure how that follows... the impacts of donating has diminishing returns. I'd much rather see a diverse of array of causes supported. I doubt any of these charities rely on Amazon Smile as a primary source of donations but a lot of smaller charities would benefit
Funny sidenote is that my chosen charity was actually ProPublica
> which is only about 100 charities from the top (ordered by total amount received) received just over $10,000, and the charity at the top of the third page received $5659.
Honestly, this seems rather impressive. A lot higher than I thought! That's great! The reason I expected lower is because these tend to follow power laws with a very steep decline. The 200th charity makes more than half what the 100th charity makes is pretty good. I had to go through 19 pages of charities (I counted 126 lines on one page, but I probably miscounted so +/- some) before I started to see them go below $1k. That's quite impressive though, there's over 2k charities getting over $1k
> So it seems imminently reasonable to me that, rather than give a couple hundred bucks a year to thousands and thousands and thousands of charities, to instead consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good.
Specifically, where it can most efficiently buy image and influence for Amazon. For profit corporations charitable donations, like any other expenditures of corporate funds, are made to advance the commercial interests of the corporation.
Who is the “they” in “They would have bigger impact”, by what criteria, and why does this “they” have any relevance to the effectiveness whatsoever?
Seriously. Amazon is literally just writing a check, or just as likely, putting store credit in an account.
Where do they figure in to donating at all beyond a middle man?
Seriously, how does Amazon differ than GoFundMe in this context? And as a follow up, if this is such a good move for “effectiveness” why shouldn’t GoFundMe do they same thing?
> consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good.
It also gives Amazon much more control over the charity. If you give $1000 to a charity, they are happy and do their thing. If you give a charity $1,000,000 your priorities are going to become their priorities.
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.
If your “less cynical” (I’d say “more naive” :P) take is true, then where’s their concurrent announcement that they’re donating .5% of sales (or at least .5* * % of revenue that was amazon-smiled since not everyone used it) to a smaller set of organizations?
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.
I had already canceled my Prime membership and started shopping elsewhere. I'm not exactly outraged by this news - although I did always buy through Smile - but I'm now doubly sure Amazon won't be my first choice going forward.
I think a lot of folks can get by without a Prime membership. My prime subscription ended almost a year ago now and I don't miss it. Amazon shipping has got progressively slower as time went on. Prime video is terrible UX with subpar content. At $15 a month it just isnt worth it.
I've now opted for the "free" shipping that you get when you spend $25+. Items that I cannot wait for I will buy local, which usually now offer same day delivery.
Cancelling my Prime membership a few years ago made it immediately clear that all I was paying for was to not have my package sit in the warehouse for an extra 3-4 days before making it to my house in two days anyway. I also started getting shipments coming from warehouses on the other side of the country, something that never happened while I was paying for Prime. Immediately clear that the benefits for ordering were entirely artificial.
> I also started getting shipments coming from warehouses on the other side of the country, something that never happened while I was paying for Prime.
That doesn't sound entirely artificial to me, though? It seems more likely that they're reserving stock in closer (and likely, more expensive) warehouses for people who are paying for two day shipping, either by having a Prime membership or by paying for the shipping.
> Amazon shipping has got progressively slower as time went on.
While there are definitely periods where I would have agreed with you, recently Amazon has seriously increased the % of products which are deliverable same day.
It's also not just for common items. I can buy a thermocouple amplifier board and have it delivered today. It really scratches an itch when you can get components for a project delivered THAT DAY. I could be playing with thermocouples TODAY. Hard to resist.
"The fun part of Amazon Smile was that it let customers decide how they wanted to change the world"
The corporate justification part of amazon smile was in the same effort as any charity in purchase which is to make the consumer feel empowered, righteous and moral for the decision to consume a product. Charity tie ins like rainforest donations or carbon offsets are designed to incense consumers to evangelize. They're designed to eliminate buyers remorse returns and blunt the often ever present reality of sweat shop labor. That anyone got real money from this is just a happy side effect.
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.
Honest? Why should we believe all of the Amazon smile purchases will continue and contribute to charity? If the program is getting scrapped, are we to believe Amazon is going to send 0.5% of everyone’s purchases to charity?
This is an attempt to recover revenue, nothing more.
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're a public company so it'll be on their 10-K in some form. And of course the charities would notice if they didn't, though they're only going to mention good news.
This is not a bad question, but part of the value of Smile was that it was very easy to support a selected charity as a side effect of another activity.
I think this will hurt smaller charities. They might not have been getting a huge donation from Smile, but I also think a lot of Smile users aren't going to consciously donate to the charity they selected - certainly not in the $5-$10 range that is probably more than most individual shoppers accounted for each term - and as a result those charities will be taking in less than before.
Smile was a good program. I have no idea what it cost Amazon to operate, but I am pretty confident it resulted in more money going to charity than whatever Amazon will now do instead.
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 were getting donations which were completely incongruent with Amazon’s moral sensibilities.
There’s no law saying they have to let customers pick, and this isn’t worth “outrage”, but I think it’s behavior which signals a lot about the way Amazon’s top leadership has shifted.