As a Smile user, I’m disappointed in this decision, but not surprised. Profit margins in retail are often thin. I think for Amazon it has been low single digits (I read it was 2.25% in 3Q22). So paying out 0.5% of revenues was probably significant for them. I think the company is under some shareholder pressure since Bezos left the CEO position. Turning off Smile will also allow the company to better manage earnings by managing how much they want to give in any given period. I’m not defending Amazon, just making observations.
This is super annoying, particularly because Amazon Smile replaced their previously much more beneficial and lucrative charity program. And! After many many requests they never pivoted to pilot a teacher wishlist support program AND they provide a lot of stuff to DonorsChoose which is charges ridiculous fees and inflated prices.
It is a business decision. They didn’t charge extra to make the donation.
I know everyone loves Bombas socks, but I feel they just charge double to donate a pair of socks for every one you buy. Sure it is nice that ‘they’ donate to charity, but it is really you donating the extra pair of socks and you get no credit for the donation. Tom’s shoes is the same way. Although I love them and buy a lot, it is a ‘feel good’ donation for me and I get no credit for the donation (I just paid double for my shoes).
This is very disappointing, particularly for small non-profits. Perhaps if we all post about it on social media it might get some media attention that could cause Amazon to reconsider. Now what’s left for local schools? Grocery receipt programs?
A local food growing non profit was promoting Amazon Smile on their social media. Apparently they hadn’t heard it was ending. Someone broke the news in the comments.
Apparently Amazon can’t even afford to keep their worthy employees, let alone contribute to thousands of worthy charities. It’s a lean time in the FAANG world.
It’s unfortunate, but to hazard a guess, this program was not all that easy to administer. Sure, the national programs (Red Cross, your favorite top Uni) were easy to setup, but I can imagine a bunch of fake nonprofits being established to fraudulently receive funds. It’s those non-national ‘nonprofits’ that would have to be verified by staff.
And then the actual donations to millions of nonprofits need be audited by Amazon’s auditors. (not the nonprofit, but the transactions themselves)
If they were worried about fraudulent organizations, Amazon could have said that any nonprofits needed to have a certain rating in Charity Navigator or similar to receive Smile designations. Even if that might have hurt some of the tiny nonprofits (like the one I had designated), there would still be a wide array of nonprofits, not all of which are big mega-names, and people could have selected other organizations to benefit from the program. But eliminating it entirely? Not a fan.
Even though Amazon currently has a present for a friend’s birthday party for 32% off, we’ll be heading to Barnes & Noble today to see if they have it in-stock. (Party is next week, so there’s sufficient time for delivery either way.)
I understood Smile was run through a separate 501(c)(3) foundation? So presumably it was a discrete entity from Amazon itself.
Yes, I can imagine it was a nightmare. But reducing the contribution Amazon made to the foundation and limiting the recipients might have made for a better public relations outcome.
I am getting a bit annoyed with Amazon these days. Its website is nowhere as focused as it used to be, and there are so many third-party sellers and fake reviews, that I know have some apps to do an AI reading on the reviews to give a sense if the reviews and the seller are legit.
you are exactly right, and with that tip, I was able to pull up the 990. It looks like Amazon covered 100% of the staff wages to run this program, so by eliminating it, they also save whatever staff time was devoted to it. In 2019, they paid out $45m to charities.
$45m is chump change to Bezos, but I’m sure it helped plenty of charities.
We shouldn’t forget that the wealth generated from AMZN has actually resulted in much good: Bezos’ ex-wife has used her divorce settlement to so far give $14 billion(!) to charities.