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 an attempt to recover revenue, nothing more.

Here's Meta as an example https://about.meta.com/giving-together/

They gave $7B to all sorts of random stuff like cat shelters

Pretty much every company has some stuff like this. Don't you see think it'd be weird if Amazon was the 1 company that doesnt?

Edit: Better article here that distinguishes between Meta's matching and donation from meta users https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/fundraise-for-nonprofits-g....

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.

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.

1. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/46262...

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...

They do great work.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...

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".

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.

- 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.

I bet if the offered round up for charity in the checkout process the funds collected would dwarf those raised by the smile program.

Not "actual worth to society."

A market based, consumer driven approach like Amazon Smile, is likely optimal.

Consumers, on average, are very effective and logical choosers (on average).

Amazon Smile was likely a highly effective program.

Issue is, Amazon now wants to redirect its customer's dollars to improve its reputation.

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.

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?

Carefully recorded in tax filings.

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.

Put another way, not every (e.g.) $5000 yields the same impact.

More in fewer hands? Where have we've seen that before? How's that working out for us?

Funny sidenote is that my chosen charity was actually ProPublica

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FZZ2FDK

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.