That's the new trend in many grocery stores.

Someone on HN or Reddit mentioned that grocery charities are actually a tactic to estimate the sign of the derivative of e the customer base's grocery-discretionary income, as a hint of when to raise prices.

Interesting angle. Any resources to back up that claim?

Feels so dirty, like free health screenings for employees, when the real purpose is to built an insurance risk profile for a geographic area.

Or simply introduce themselves as the vector for charity, taking corporate credit for the donations of their customers.

This is what I always guessed was the reason.

I never donate via proxy, I don't want to give some corporation a tax deduction on my behalf. I am sure they are doing this for PR purposes.

HN; the place where people use "sign of the derivative" instead of "trend" or "growth".

I was particularly confused by the typo, "sign of the derivative of e", e being constant.

sign of d/dx e^(discretionary income) perhaps

I always assumed the reason was to generate $XXX million in donations for a tax deduction for the grocery store chain.

It doesn’t work like that with regards to taxing. What they do get is a good PR image at no cost to themselves (many places don’t match any donations[0]). Worse, some even keep a percent in “administrative fees” [1]

And there is concern that these checkout charities are replacing more traditional means of corporate giving, reducing net contributions.

Whether or not they make you feel ambushed, due diligence is worth hope before giving, as some companies (and the non-profits they give to) are more worthy than other.

[0] Such as walgreens. But there are some places, like Costco, that will match customer and employee giving.

[1] Petco

I'm not a tax attorney but I don't think that's how deductions work.

Do you mind explaining more?

I was under the impression that a corporation can take a tax deduction for charitable donations. There's a line item for it on Form 1120 (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1120.pdf)

In order to take the tax deduction of an expense to a charity they have to first recognize the income the customer just gave them.

Since the income and the deduction directly offset each other, this is a zero sum maneuver.

Ah, okay. Thanks!

Ralphs and Vons in California have been doing the charity ask for years. I always assumed it was their way of bragging later "how much they gave back to the community" while conveniently forgetting to mention those funds came from customer donations. I hate it, too.

Safeway also.

Safeway and Vons are both subsidiaries of Albertson's.

The charity donation thing has been part of WF forever. They do it on and off over the years.

South Park making fun of them for it in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKsOwJ8AGWo

Panda Express kicks this up a notch and has a little bell they ring whenever someone donates their change adding an element of social pressure/shame, super scummy

They are scummy in general. All the PEs near me stop cooking all their best entree items by 7PM on the theory that customers will accept whatever slop is left... yet they continue to offer all their items over mobile (they'll just happily tell you they "ran out" when you get there).

Panda Express is high up there in the list of nastiest fast food places. Pure garbage food. And as you probably know, they will gladly dump a fresh batch of Orange Chicken on top of a 3 hour old batch and so some portion of their entrees are kept on the hot plate for half a day. Nasty. What they do is criminal.

You should perhaps, never look at how food is prepared at any fast food location. At every food prep place I've worked, we only saw the big boss when they were running over to tell us to replace everything because they saw the health inspector. Usually they had the line manager telling us to replace nothing, and firing or reducing hours of employees who followed the posted food safety guides

I absolutely hate their charity solicitation. If I’m going to donate to anything, it’s going to be a charity of my own choice after a thorough vetting with no middlemen. Next time I go there, I’m tempted to request they round down my total instead.

I would actively avoid donating in that case, because I don't like attention for that kind of thing.

Panda Express is an odd chain, perhaps even odder than Chick-Fil-A (which is closed on Sundays). They participate in Landmark Forum which is a retreat where you spend most of a weekend having some rowdy guy tell you what they think really matters in life. https://www.quora.com/Is-the-corporate-culture-of-Panda-Expr... Like Chick-Fil-A, their unusual beliefs and practices probably just makes the insiders prouder of the company.

If someone's going to make me uncomfortable, I'd stop going there. But if I really still wanted to go there, I'd work on a spiel about the charities I like and when they ask me to donate, I'd ask them to donate.

You're only making it harder on the wage slave behind the check stand. Theyre required to ask.

I wasn't suggesting I would pick a random charity just to be vindictive.

Ugh I hate that. I don't donate money so that I can stand around saying "Hey, Look what I did!"

They have to recoup the losses from all the free fortune cookies they give.

South Park

Sorry, what's wrong with REI? I've never been asked to donate to charity at my local REI...

Haven't you been pushed about getting an REI membership? I think twice before asking any REI salesman for help, because I know they are going to push me to get a membership. They're doing their job since their incentives are tied to memberships to some degree, but it makes for a poor experience.

/edit:I'd rather be asked about a membership once at the cashier's than by every sales staff I talk to during my visit.

REI is one of the most responsible retail business around in my mind. They still operate as a co-op and I don't expect that to change in the foreseeable future. I haven't experienced any pushiness from their staff, which is anecdotal, but I've been a customer for years in a least 4 states.

If you anticipate shopping there more than once, or for any large item (excluding sales), then a membership is worth it. The dividend is 10% so it pays for itself after $200.

I've been shopping at REI for years and have never been asked about membership by the people working the floor. Also if you're shopping at REI without a membership you're doing it wrong. You get a percentage of every purchase back as dividend that you can put towards anything in the store.

They'll actually give it back to you as cash also, though I've never used that option because I always find more things I want/need.

Oh, I see. To be fair, I signed up and paid $20 for a membership many years ago; it's a one-time fee to never have to worry about saving receipts, which is a massive win for me since I shop there so often, and to get the dividend which inevitably amounts to far more than the one-time $20 charge.

So, to be fair, I don't recall being pushed, since it made sense to me, and they wouldn't push me now because I'm already a member.

my wife probably signed up sometime- cos when I gave them my phone number they said you have $21 dividend- want to apply it? I was like - wow - I love this place and I don't even shop there a lot. Don't love their prices but I love REI. Too bad the Orchard Supply which is also a CoOp is shutting down.

> Haven't you been pushed about getting an REI membership? I think twice before asking any REI salesman for help, because I know they are going to push me to get a membership.

Do you realize that REI is a co-op [1] and the membership will entitle you to cash back on your purchases and a vote for their board of directors? It's a one-time fee, and mine paid for itself the first year I had it. It's a stupid grocery store loyalty card.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_co-operative

> It's a stupid grocery store loyalty card.

TYPO DETECTED: I just realized I meant to say it's not a stupid grocery store loyalty card, it's way better for the customer.

Probably better, because they don't datamine you.

It's a coop, that's what they do.

FWIW the dividend is pretty nice. Combined with the sale I saved a pretty solid chunk of money on a nice cooler.

The donation inquiries are not from Amazon, they were doing this well before Amazon bought them.

I worked there as a cashier.

You got tested on this.

Prime account is just the replacement for their rewards program. For the month of... may? The old one who stopped and the prime one hadn't started. This made some customers mad.

Plus it's a lot easier if you're basically running off a script to do the eight hours of repetition.

The charity donation thing has been around for a while. South Park even had an episode 3 years ago about Whole Foods and the pushy donations.

I quit donating to charity after I found out that Red Cross only gives a small fraction of its donations to charity the rest is spent on Administration costs.

Just like colleges and the healthcare industry.

Got to pay all those vp's of vp's of vp's.

It's not a "small fraction". You're probably confused with Susan Komen. Red Cross has it's faults, but if they can serve more victims by hiring more effective people with 6 figure salaries, aren't they doing more good?

By analogy, the main rocket on the space shuttle has two stages of fuel pumps...powered by rocket fuel. So you could say that's inefficient, why not run fuel straight from the tanks into the rocket. But it can't pump enough in to get enough thrust unless it uses some of its fuel so that it could burn even more fuel.

My personal charity gripe is the blood bank. They make it out like you're a hero, meanwhile they bill the patient thousands of dollars. They hide behind "but people with disease might donate if we paid them", well they pay people for plasma. And they have to test for HIV anyway (not only that, HIV isn't even a death sentence anymore). If they want my blood they can donate it to the patient or give me 50% of what they bill.

There are very significant issues with the Red Cross and how it spends money. For example: https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...

> NPR and ProPublica went in search of the nearly $500 million and found a string of poorly managed projects, questionable spending and dubious claims of success, according to a review of hundreds of pages of the charity's internal documents and emails, as well as interviews with a dozen current and former officials.

> The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people, but the number of permanent homes the charity has built is six.

By all means, donate to a deserving charity. The RC probably isn't one.

I remember that story when it broke. But I thought there was a good reason why they didn't build houses. I can't remember, but it was something like the people didn't own the land they lived on, so building would have been giving the land owner a free house, not a hurricane victim. Or else armed thugs would steal any structure built.

So every blood drive is basically free money for the medical industry. We get the feeling of doing good while they charge the patient probably excessivly large amounts of money behind out backs Thays so sleazy. My aunt got bit by a rattle snake and her emergency room costs for one afternoon in the E.R were 48000 dollars. All they did was give her anitvenom and observe. I'm sure that would cost next to nothing in another country. Such a sketch industry.

As to the Red Cross, It also feels pretty sketch.

https://www.npr.org/2014/12/04/368453320/red-cross-misstates...

That's a good reason not to donate to the red cross. There are other organizations out there with extremely high efficiency ratios and noble missions, and you shouldn't let one highly publicized rotten apple poison the rest.

You quit donating to charity because one specific charity is egregiously bad? Isn't that a bit like ceasing to eat because you had something yucky once?

... one specific charity was accused of doing something bad.

The Red Cross is frequently accused of having excessive management costs and mismanaging funds; if you do a little research (a) they appear to have reasonable overhead (b) a lot of the accusations seem to come from competing charities with higher overheads.

Not transparent enough for me!

https://www.npr.org/2014/12/04/368453320/red-cross-misstates...

Just out of curiosity, can you find a source for the "26% spent on fundraising" figure? Charity Navigator only goes back to the 2000s and never shows anything near that.

Charity Navigator: https://www.redcross.org/about-us/our-work/international-ser... Haiti spending: https://www.redcross.org/about-us/our-work/international-ser...

Yeah I just donate to actual organizations that are changing the world like the ACLU.

...

They're a charity. You didn't stop donating to charity.

Thanks for the correction!

“No thanks, I choose my own charities.”

ha, I had a job interview recently and they had me do a take home thing. They offered to pay me for it, just a few hundred dollars for the time I put in. That's cool.

But in the email they asked if I wanted the money, or I could donate it.

Right now I could use the money, but now I feel just a little bad about it.

So you replied that you'll donate the money yourself to the charity of your choosing?

To which they replied, "no worries let me know your favorite charity and we'll send it over right away!" LOL

Here the potential employer is clearly looking for an indication of the financial situation of the candidate, to be in the position of power when negotiating the salary. So it would be important to deny this data. A simple "Here's my bank account, I'll donate it myself" should be enough.

They had already rejected me, so who cares.

Though I do appreciate your well cultivated sense of suspicion and cynicism. Keep it up!

Before Trump's tax law which upped the standard deduction to the point very few have the ability to deduct... a benefit of donating yourself is your can deduct it from your taxes.

But, you'd have to recognize it as earned income; and you'd have to pay self employment taxes on it; making the donation cost you money.

-- OR --

You file it as income to your sole proprietorship or llc; you "sponsor" something charitable as an expense.

Either way, the deduction and the income are at best 0 sum.

Though, if it's less than $600; they may not file a 1099 and you may "forget" to report it.

I'm a little confused on your comment? Is this in regards to how to deduct a donation post-Trump tax law?

I'm a regular salaried employee, all my income is reported on a W2. Pre-Trump, if I donated $ to my favorite charity...it's deductible if I exceed standard deduction.

Pre 2018 or post are the same for how the deduction is a deduction and not a credit.

That is to say that on w2 income you will pay payroll tax and on 1099 you may pay self employment tax -- in addition to income tax. You then get to deduct the income tax only. So the presented case, to get paid a small sum as a contractor that either you or the company will donate to a charity; it's going to be a net 0 or net negative to take the income and then donate it 100% compared to letting the company donate it.

The relevant changes were to the standard deduction and the % cap (if you're donating >50% of your income). Technically, the standard deduction doesn't matter here at all, that's a choice, it would be a net negative for the filer to choose itemized over the standard if they don't exceed the standard.

The 2018 changes also effect the pass through rate, so there is a small possibility that if you took payment in your pte, you'd be taxed at 21% cap, your business didn't make enough to pay self employment tax, and then you donate the money from your normal earned income at the 22 or 24% rate.