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Amazon Closing AmazonSmile

• yellowapple 4y ago
  The fact that every one of my purchases was helping some local charity of my choice was one of the few things keeping me on Amazon.
• lucy68diamond 4y ago
  Amazon's decision to 'wind down' Amazon Smile is nauseating and pathetic. Their greed knows no bounds. I have raised a considerable amount for my charity through this programme, which is a small local non-profit organisation which takes in and rehomes abandoned and unwanted animals. It is these small, largely unknown, struggling charities that benefit so greatly from Amazon Smile. The larger charities don't need the funding in the same urgent way small charity organisations do. Every donation counts, however small. I am disgusted and repelled that Amazon, a multi-billion dollar conglomerate with seemingly unlimited tax breaks, corporate benefits and exemptions, should abandon the one charitable and genuinely honourable programme it offers; notably that each customer can choose which charities to support, resulting in keeping afloat innumerable small and obscure non-profits, a majority which would otherwise remain unknown and overlooked. A majority of these immeasurably valuable organisations are totally reliant on contributions, grateful for every penny they receive in donations. It is deplorable that Amazon, an obscenely profitable and market-dominating consortium, should abandon what has been the only benevolent and honourable attributes of the company. To justify this contemptable greed and grossness they have announced that Amazon will instead be donating to prominent chosen (by whom?) charities, no doubt largely high-profile ones that already receive considerable donations and publicity. They are utterly shameless. 'AmazonSmile represents a very small portion of the total charitable contributions made through our other programmes, which we estimate at more than £100 million in 2021.' Isn't this the point? To reach charities that are overlooked and underfunded? I feel sick......
• m-watson 4y ago
  Here is a link to Amazon's release: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-closing-amazonsmile-to-focus-its-philanthropic-giving-to-programs-with-greater-impact https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-closing...
• nso95 4y ago
  I wonder if they laid the team off
  • gregschlom 4y ago
    That's what the article says. Ending the program allows them to save the 0.5% they would have donated and lay off the team that supported the program.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• gdelfino01 4y ago
  This may have a bigger impact than they think. Is Amazon good for the world? For some, the answer is no but still buy at Amazon as any sins are compensated by the the small donation to a NGO of choice.
  • rcme 4y ago
    I don't think the sins of Amazon are any worse than most other major U.S. retailers.
    • throwayyy479087 4y ago
      They're absolutely not - but the people that attack Amazon don't care about that. Amazon to many represents Capitalism, and so acts as a catchall for criticisms of Capitalism. Ironically, small family shops use WAY more child labor, unpaid labor etc as a percentage than Amazon. They also produce more plastic per item, take only cash to evade taxes, etc.
      • skinnymuch 4y ago
        Oh no small family shops are evading taxes…good thing corporations don’t that…
        • giantg2 4y ago
          Tax evasion has a different meaning than how you are using it.
      • Retric 4y ago
        It’s hard to imagine the average small business successfully evading taxes as well as Amazon. In 2019 Amazon paid zero taxes receiving a net $129 million refund from the federal government, in 2018 they received a $137 million refund after paying 0$ on a net income of 11.2 billion dollars. In 2020 they paid a net tax of $162 million on $13.9 billion of pre-tax income a net tax rate of 1.2%.
• ryandvm 4y ago
  Again?
  • wardedVibe 4y ago
    This happened before?
    • tech234a 4y ago
      Previously posted 18 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338
• meow_mix 4y ago
  Smiling was a low interest rate phenomenon
  • steveBK123 4y ago
    yup low cost of capital allowed low margins & high multiples .. now we are seeing lower multiples and attempts to transition to higher margins
• perlgeek 4y ago
  > "our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin" If that's the supposed reason, I call bullshit. Could've just reduced the number of charities.
  • spookthesunset 4y ago
    Which charities should be remain?
    • perlgeek 4y ago
      You can select which charity to support on smile.amazon.de at least. So pick the top 10% or 5% or whatever charities that were supported by the most customers.
      • gharman 4y ago
        Funny thing is I’d bet the small amount trickling in to the long tail charities is more impactful to them than a larger amount to the big mega-charities. I run one of those long tails and Amazon Smile was just right to cover running costs for hosting, bank fees, etc.
        • bombcar 4y ago
          Honestly I'm surprised they're doing this; something must have bit them on the paperwork side, because $100-$200 for each tiny charity (think local dog shelter, local church, etc; even if they're 'branded' they're often independent charities) was a cheap advertisement for Amazon. Now that's over.
          • fakedang 4y ago
            Because it came under the field of vision of some dumbass MBA who decided that saving a few millions would be worth more and a sizeable contribution to their end of year bonus figure. Source: I'm a dumbass MBA admittee.
• dbg31415 4y ago
  It's weird that corporations have philanthropic arms, isn't it?
  • babyshake 4y ago
    It's mostly just tax avoidance, right?
    • IgorPartola 4y ago
      The way I understand it is that Amazon offers an affiliate fee to affiliates. When you don’t go through an affiliate they get to keep the small percentage. Smile was basically Amazon’s own affiliate program that paid out to NGOs. It did reduce their tax liability but it’s not like it’s free money. Assuming a corporate rate of 15%, when Amazon pays a charity $100, they save $15 on taxes. That mean they spent $85, so not exactly tax avoidance unless the charity they donate to is also owned by Amazon or some such.
    • waynesonfire 4y ago
      or a talking point. government and business work very closely together and when these two negotiate, the government likes to see philanthropy.
    • tpmoney 4y ago
      Only in the sense that money that would have been taxed as income was instead paid to charities. Simplified example, they took in $200 and paid $50 of that to a charity. At 10% they paid $15 in taxes instead of $20. If you think charities are overall a net positive (and especially if you think they’re more efficient at getting money to the right places than the government) a loss of $5 in government revenue for $50 into charities seems like a good deal
    • Rebelgecko 4y ago
      How so? Taxable income is pretty much always better than 0 income
    • stevenwoo 4y ago
      There's a comment on reddit by someone who claimed to be working on this when it was started - the entire program was to avoid paying money to Google for searches resulting in sales on Amazon, by making Amazon the first place to go instead of Google. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_discontinues_charity_donation_program_amid/j4znb8y/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• antiterra 4y ago
  This seems incredibly poorly done from a PR perspective and there's no way to make this headline read well for them. Why not create and announce they're moving to something like "Amazon GiveBack" that gives some sliders to users to vote on the allocation? Sure, people could still call them out on how it's a reduction of what they're donating, but there's a much higher chance the headline reads well for them. As it is, the underlying symbolic implication is that Amazon is getting rid of its smile and instead.. frowning?
  • Spivak 4y ago
    I would actually kinda love that in a let's just ride the wave of dystopia kinda way. > Announcing "Amazon Frown": Every year we will donate $10 million dollars each to <worst people imaginable> but you can stop us. Select your most hated group and 1% of your purchase amount will be reduced from the donation.
    • MrLeap 4y ago
      This is a beautiful suggestion that would be guaranteed to drive engagement.
  • kylehotchkiss 4y ago
    > that gives some sliders to users to vote on the allocation? A lot of charities tend to side with one political affiliation or the other. When people see %not their political affiliations% charity, they take it personally, and try to boycott the service. So this might do more harm than good.
    • antiterra 4y ago
      True, but the evil PR goal here is to eventually decomisison the sliders and just say that Amazon participates in philanthropy without generating a bad headline/sentiment. I think they could find neutral enough charities in the meantime, such as those for specific health conditions, habitat for humanity, etc
• JaggedJax 4y ago
  With the caveat being I know nothing about them, is a service like Cultivate (https://www.wecultivate.us https://www.wecultivate.us) a good alternative? Are there any others? I went searching around for options after this change and the things I like seeing about Cultivate is that it both tells me about options to purchase an item on a site that is NOT Amazon, as well as keeping the donation feature.
  • 56friends 4y ago
    I would rather donate $10 to my local charity monthly than have one more company track my entire browsing history.
    • JaggedJax 4y ago
      Good point. The main thing I was looking for was something to recommend me alternatives to Amazon when looking at a product.
      • 56friends 4y ago
        Makes sense! The only way I personally found to deal with this is check different websites manually. It's either that or some extension that can automate this process in return for all my data.
• yunwal 4y ago
  They also never supported smile donations from the mobile app for no good reason, so it was always pretty clear to me that it was nothing more than a PR stunt/tax write off.
  • adamt 4y ago
    I believe they did - I've used this - full instructions here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?ie=UTF8&node=17337655031 https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?ie=UTF8&node=17337655031
  • staringback 4y ago
    > They also never supported smile donations from the mobile app for no good reason They 100% did > nothing more than a PR stunt/tax write off Do you even know what a tax write off is? PR stunt of course, but that is every single company who also donates to charity. Should we instead shame companies for blatant PR stunts so that they donate $0 instead?
    • yunwal 4y ago
      I’m aware tax write offs don’t save money if that’s what you’re asking. > Should we instead shame companies Companies obviously exist for profit, but companies at the size of Amazon can take the view that doing good things is genuinely good for business on a level deeper than quick PR (creates company alignment, healthier economy). PR is a competitive, zero-sum game. > Should we instead shame… Yeah. This isn’t a purity test for a company who’s genuinely trying to change things for the better. This is shaming using charity to launder human rights abuses, dishonest business practices, anticompetitive behavior and win favor with politicians.
  • delecti 4y ago
    > nothing more than a PR stunt/tax write off It was neither. It was a way to get people to go directly to Amazon in their browser rather than search items through Google. Clicking through Amazon from Google results gives Google an affiliate commission on those sales.
    • 4y ago
• dsjoerg 4y ago
  Total bummer. I loved AmazonSmile. It wasn't about _their_ impact, it was about the impact of _my_ purchases. Which is now gone.
• rpmisms 4y ago
  Damn. I used AmazonSmile to support my favorite extremist group. (Firearms Policy Coalition) I wonder if that had anything to do with it...
  • Rebelgecko 4y ago
    I wouldn't be totally surprised, given the effort to get the FPC 501c3 delisted from smile last month. I thought part of what made Smile cool is that Amazon would forward my donations to such a wide range of organizations (eg my local church OR my local satanic temple). Talk about consumer choice.
    • Spivak 4y ago
      Twitch also ran into this issue recently where blindly allowing donations to any registered charity ended up being a bad look for them. It think it was autism speaks (autism / neurodivergence is a disease that needs to be cured and "not technically eugenics", not popular with gamers, go figure) and the lgb alliance (a boring trans-hate group).
      • troad 4y ago
        > the lgb alliance (a boring trans-hate group) Can you direct me to any place where the LGB Alliance officially affirms “trans hate” as their core message? Seems like a remark that fails the barest minimum of common sense thresholds, in that it’s unclear to me how any such body could ever hope to remain a tax-deductible registered charity.
        • singlow 4y ago
          They obviously don't call it hate themselves. It is the opinion of certain trans groups that the positions taken by the organisation are based on hate. Of course hate in modern lingo just means disagreement, or failure to support the specific legislative agenda of a particular group. LGB Alliance states that it believes many cases of transition are actually a form of therapy to remove gay-ness. That a gay person is led to believe they can be "straight" if they transition to the opposite sex. So in their view, transitioning is a form of homophobia, but in the view of trans groups, the LGB alliance is anti-trans. From the LGB Alliance webpage: > Very many children, and quite possibly adults, enter the process of gender transition as a result of the homophobia of their parents, peer group, or their own internalised dislike of their sexual orientation. Young gay men or lesbians are being sold a myth that they can be straight, that lesbians are really straight men and that gay men are really straight women. This is homophobic conversion therapy.
• lm4catsy 4y ago
  The new goals for impact giving are something that Jeff Bezo should personally live by. Leave the grassroots giving to us happy consumers (former consumers?)
• renewiltord 4y ago
  Never ended up using this thing. Always had to switch URLs. Couldn't care less honestly. Despite ordering tens of thousands of dollars off the place, I have $1.20 given to some random water charity.
• cheriot 4y ago
  > Amazon is trying to find money wherever it can Not really. Amazon is spending more cash on english language TV and movies than Netflix. It's also acquiring it's way into... health care? All of the things that make money at Amazon are related to the core e-commerce biz (ads, subscriptions, marketplace) or some core competency developed to support e-commerce (AWS). They have no competitive advantage in providing medical care, making movies, or household gadgets. Big tech is struggling with the idea that their business is maturing and will be less exciting from here. It's a tough pill for hot shot founders/managers to swallow.
• CodeWriter23 4y ago
  I think this is a little short-sighted on Amazon's part. PTA/PTOs were onboarding loyal Amazon customers via Amazon Smile because of the fundraising. In the last PTO I was involved with, Smile accounted for about 2% of our donations ($3000/year = ~$150K in household spending from our school). To put that in perspective, about 90% of our $150K annual fund raise was direct donations from parents and local businesses, AND Amazon's contribution was 3 of the 60 MacBook Airs in the One-to-one laptop program our magnet was funding annually. Maybe we judge "effectiveness" on a different scale than Amazon but we sure appreciated their 5% contribution to that program. Now these organizations will switch all that customer loyalty to Target Red Card.
  • mouly 4y ago
    Does Target Red Card offer charity donations like Amazon Smile? Asking for our PTO.
    • jacurtis 4y ago
      You don't even need the Red Card. Go into your Target app, go to your account, click on "Target Circle" and then you scroll down to where it says "Vote for NonProfits". I only learned about this a few months ago. I saw that I had accrued like 80 "votes" for non-profits. So you can go in there and distribute your votes to applicable non-profits in the area and presumably each vote is worth a fixed amount that is sent to them. I know very little about the program other than using it as a consumer over the last few months. But hopefully that helps. I don't have the Target Red Card. But I use the app for savings, so I scan the app when I checkout at Target and i've been accruing these votes the whole time without realizing.
  • rcme 4y ago
    Looks like Target stopped supporting schools through Target Red Card in 2016? https://www.ptotoday.com/pto-today-articles/article/6232-target-to-end-redcard-school-donation-program https://www.ptotoday.com/pto-today-articles/article/6232-tar...
    • 4y ago
• ja3k 4y ago
  To be honest I hated the nags. Little pop ups on amazon.com and occasional e-mails that didn't even have unsubscribe links. If you want to donate to charity great, but as your customer I don't want to hear about it.
• Willish42 4y ago
  I don't particularly like using Amazon but the Smile program was the thing to sway me towards using it when convenient. I'm sure convenience alone will win them plenty but for my personal use this is a huge disappointment. I am almost certain the .5% they were giving away from my purchases/would save from this change will be less than the profit from products I will no longer buy from Amazon. I would assume this is the case for many users and agree this is likely a short-sighted change. Scary indication of things to come as money policy keeps making companies more frugal.
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Meanwhile, Amazon _net profits_ in Q3 2022 were just shy of $3B.
  • aeternum 4y ago
    But they lost it all by betting on Rivian https://twitter.com/EconomyApp/status/1578475690772508672/photo/1 https://twitter.com/EconomyApp/status/1578475690772508672/ph...
    • insane_dreamer 4y ago
      No, not really. Equity loss is unrealized loss -- it's just on paper because the stock price is down. If Rivian's share price goes back up, that loss becomes a gain. Whereas the $3B net profit is real money they can put into their coffers (or share with shareholders). Edit: now if Rivian goes bankrupt and delists, then yes, at that point Amazon does lose however many $Bs they invested which they will put as a write-off.
      • bushbaba 4y ago
        They invested ~1.3B for an 18% stake in the company. At todays market cap that’s 2.6B for a profit of 1.3B from initial investment, or a 100% gain on their investment
• joelesler 4y ago
  As a board member of an organization that was benefiting from Amazon Smile, this is just the lamest set of excuses I've ever seen. Amazon should have said: "We're cutting this because we don't want to maintain it, it hasn't been staffed, and isn't focused in our core business (making money)" I would have believed that.
  • trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    You may see it differently having profited but I think good riddance. Shoppers shouldn't get the false sense they're doing something good by buying at Amazon. We spend $100 and they donate 50 cents but the remaining 99.5% of the money is spent in ways that do not benefit us common folk, often to the contrary. Better to be mindful what and where you buy, shopping at Amazon and then letting them do a small donation seems a bit like they're handing out indulgence certificates. People can make donations in their own name and get tax deductions for it, unlike with Smile where Amazon claims the deductions for itself. And why should a giant multinational corporation decide for us a list of eligible donation receivers? Some of those "charities" are very questionable and I doubt the average customer looks much into if what they do with the money even aligns with their own vision of a better world.
    • themitigating 4y ago
      People could donate before Amazon Smile existed why would that increase now it's gone? I'm sure many people like the ease of donating through this program. Finally the last part of your comment is so disturbing. "I doubt the average customer looks much into if what they do with the money even aligns with their own vision of a better world."
      • andirk 4y ago
        Why is that disturbing? There are a lot of "non-profit" "charities" that are corrupt.
        • themitigating 4y ago
• AdamH12113 4y ago
  I like the idea behind Amazon Smile but the execution is a bit underwhelming. I've spent tens of thousands of dollars at Amazon since joining Amazon Prime, but I've only generated $98.66 in donations -- a fraction of a percent. That's worse than just rounding up the price to the nearest dollar. What's the point? I get that Amazon's retail profit margins are terrible, but if they're only going to donate a totally insignificant percentage of their revenue, they shouldn't get any credit for it. Apparently Amazon came to the same conclusion. If you want to see how much your Amazon Smile account has contributed, there's a web page: https://smile.amazon.com/charity/my-impact https://smile.amazon.com/charity/my-impact
  • KWD 4y ago
    My contribution through Smile was $102. I also thought this was very small for the amount I order, however, combined with other Smile customers donating to the same charity (Feeding America) Smile generated $846,092 in donations to the charity. That made me feel better about the combined effect.
  • saagarjha 4y ago
    For many people, that's $98.66 more than would have gone to a charity.
  • andirk 4y ago
    > I get that Amazon's retail profit margins are terrible Why do you think that? I get some 2-8% of the purchase amount via their Amazon Affiliate Program. Furthermore, their "Amazon Choice" or whatever it's called where they suggest 1 version of the product over the rest is often made by Amazon itself because they saw that someone else was profiting nicely off of it so they get in between and squash the competition. Amazon is a pile, mostly.
    • AdamH12113 4y ago
      I googled "Amazon profit margin" and found several sources saying their operating profit margin is a low single-digit percentage at best.
• skee8383 4y ago
  I haven't bought anything from Amazon in years and you shouldn't either. Buying things from them supports slave labor, union busting, and low wages.
  • rwalle 4y ago
    Wow, that sounds very privileged and condescending. "And you shouldn't either"? I'm sorry I can't do that, so can't many other people. Despite all the problems, in general, Amazon is still the most convenient and accessible place to buy things with relatively good customer service. In some cases it's the only place to buy certain products. If you can live in a bubble without Amazon, great for you, but don't preach others with your (almost) impossible personal choice.
    • jiminymcmoogley 4y ago
      it might have been easier to challenge the parent commenter's assertion of Amazon Slaves existing than suggest that your preference of convenience and accessibility trumps said alleged slaves' freedom
    • fnimick 4y ago
      "If you can buy the things you need not through Amazon, you should do so." Is that better? I really struggle to find an example of something that you can only buy on Amazon, short of relisted aliexpress garbage that you should be avoiding anyway out of safety concerns.
  • nh23423fefe 4y ago
    1 of these things is not like the others
  • notatoad 4y ago
    i really don't want to be in the position of defending amazon, their anti-union activities and their treatment of workers is awful. but that's definitely not the same thing as slavery. and their pay rates for warehouse workers is high enough that it tends to raise wages in the surrounding areas.
• WesternWind 4y ago
  I've twice done tech work for charities (the second being my current contract) and this is going to affect some charities, particularly the ones that rely on donors, over others that rely on grant money.
  • luckylion 4y ago
    Though the sums were tiny, weren't they? I mean, it was $400m in 9 years, spread over a million charities in the end. To get a significant amount of money through that program, you'd need to be a big name that a lot of people would choose to donate to ... at which point you're a big name that probably gets a lot more money through regular donations.
    • WesternWind 4y ago
      One was an international charity, and tiny sums definitely matter. 12 cents buys a de-worming pill that helps keep kids free of intestinal parasites for 6 months. $35 bucks plants 20 trees in a village. Their main focus was a brick and wire based stove that prevented unnecessary deaths and blindness by reducing smoke, built locally from local materials for pennies. Big charities tend to focus on where they can have the most impact. Smaller charities tend to focus on making an impact in a place that needs it. My current charity work is as as Dev and Technical Consultant for a company that basically helps organizations do online evidence based mentoring and support in both urban and rural communities, using an app they developed. Founded basically by a professor to implement her research, than passed on to a new CEO when it took off. They work with a lot of Big Brothers Big Sisters chapters. My contract runs out in Feb and I'm not sure what I'm going to do after that, given all the local layoffs. It's not like the stuff I'm working on is at Scale or uses Machine Learning or requires K8 or whatever is going to make some hiring manager's eyes light up now.
      • luckylion 4y ago
        Oh sure, you can do good things with small amounts, I meant it more like: if you're a small charity where every penny counts, you probably didn't get thousands of dollars from Amazon because you didn't have the reach (and arguably, the time dealing with amazon may have been spent better doing something else). And if you're a big name, you're not relying on a few tens of thousands from Amazon because you're taking in millions in donations and grants each year. I assume it can be hard to transition between charity and for-profit work. Are charities following with the hiring-freeze? Wouldn't freelancers be more welcome in these times, given that they're easy to let go? Good luck in any case.
• jmcgready 4y ago
  "Once AmazonSmile closes, charities will still be able to seek support from Amazon customers by creating their own wish lists." So, Amazon's tired of revenue going out instead of coming in.... Sure, the argument can be made that Amazon does let charities join their affiliate program <https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/GYV3PYEB9BWM2L6J https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/GYV3PYE...> But how many of those smaller charities are going to want to deal with all that fine print just to set a 24 hour browser cookie?
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  > “After almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations — more than 1 million globally — our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin,” the company wrote. SO WHAT!? Any money is helpful. This is such a BS argument for getting rid of it.
• batman-farts 4y ago
  Well, this stinks. For a point of reference, I had it activated for about 2 years and directed the donations to Federation of American Scientists - not a huge name in the nonprofit space, but well-established and well-respected. According to the impact page, my orders during that time (including some big ticket stuff, about half the parts for a high-spec gaming PC) generated a grand total of $35.22, and FAS has received $1,150 during their participation in the program. I’m glad I could help pay for what’s probably less than one month of their hosting costs… It was something of a psychological hook for me, that a few pennies from each order would go to support content I appreciated. I did mentally kick myself when I forgot to place an order through the smile.amazon.com portal. I’ll probably end up giving a bit more consideration to other online retailers now, although every time I’ve ordered online from Walmart lately has been a complete disaster.
  • Insanity 4y ago
    On Walmart specifically, their grocery order search is entirely broken. You can search for an item and in the preview/drop-down see the correct item. You press enter and in the product list page it is gone.
• rcme 4y ago
  I don't understand all the people "calling bullshit" on the reason Amazon provided. Of course Amazon's reason is bullshit. Amazon knows their reason is bullshit. Amazon knows that you know the reason is bullshit. It's called saving face.
  • htag 4y ago
    I know that Amazon knows that I know the reason is bullshit..... This doesn't make bullshit any more tolerable. In fact, the blatantly obvious nature of it makes this bullshit more intolerable. It's an insult to the reader. It's an insult to truth. It degrades language by eroding the meaning of words. It harms trust and confidence. All bullshit should always be called out. It should be socially unacceptable to waste bytes and axons on bullshit.
  • dymk 4y ago
    You want everybody but Amazon to skip the formalities of recognizing they’ve done something stupid?
    • rcme 4y ago
      No, I just accept general face-saving. Like if a friend at a dinner party gets up under the pretense of stretching his legs, I don't ask him how his trip to the bathroom was when he gets back to the table.
• Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Humble Bundle has also been ratcheting down the share that goes to charities even though that's their reason for existing.
• maerF0x0 4y ago
  Personally I support this. If they're cutting their staff, they don't need to be spending on a program that gives away more than it brings in. I'm assuming they rationally did the math to see if the program was a net contributor to bottom line or not. (That's the sort of rigor i've come to expect from a company like Amazon)
• KingLancelot 4y ago
  [dead]
• drumttocs8 4y ago
  Some interesting insider perspective: https://reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/_/j4znb8y/?context=1 https://reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/_/j4znb8y/?...
• MR4D 4y ago
  I would love to see Best Buy, B&H Photo, or similar site run with this idea. They would get great marketing and help the world out, even if just a little bit.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    It’d be a great add to a store or store adjacent credit card. 1% cash back and we’ll match to a charity or something like that.
• ggm 4y ago
  Corporate donations are a poor replacement for tax based programs. I don't want to decry Gates and co, I'd rather the money was spent than not, but if you move away from "charity as a business" to not for profit programs seeking funding, they welcome corporate money mainly because it brings freedoms, where government programs generally come with strings. The US government was absolutely overt that US aid was an arc of US foreign policy and this meant that when the domestic agenda moved against womens reproductive health, so did the foreign aid money (which is why I really do want to recognize what Melinda Gates did making the gates foundation run against the tide there) But the continuity of funding is usually better when its from tax not charity. So here we are, amazon withdraws, whats the replacement income stream for the projects being funded? Amazon did a "good" thing, in the narrow context of spending money for public good. The situation this happens in is not good, and depending on charity rather than having governments fix systemic problems through tax based spending really doesn't solve the problem.
• Fr0styMatt88 4y ago
  It always annoyed me you had to explicitly go to smile.amazon.com. Couldn’t they just have made it a user preference or an option at checkout? It made me think they purposefully didn’t want people to use it.
  • kennyloginz 4y ago
    This was to avoid paying google
    • Fr0styMatt88 4y ago
      Like a patent thing?
      • kennyloginz 4y ago
        Nah, let’s say you searched for the product in google, and clicked on the Amazon result, google gets a cut. If you type in smile.Amazon.*, google can’t claim that cut ( I assume ).
• dhosek 4y ago
  When I buy stuff from Amazon, I always first click through an affiliate link so that (a) I can reduce Amazon’s profit by some minuscule amount and (2) I can direct some money to some person or organization out of money I would spend anyway. I’m usually going to some writer’s¹ website to make the purchase. 1. If you want to support this writer, there are Amazon links at https://dahosek.com/publications/ https://dahosek.com/publications/ (click on the book covers).
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    [flagged]
• byebye83 4y ago
  Amazon made $2.9 Billon in profits last year (and only paid $69 million in tax). Don’t see why they have to cut this. Oh except for greed.
• chaostheory 4y ago
  This is like if reddit decided to end custom sub-reddits. All I know is that I’m not going to like the charities that Amazon picks, and I will not be participating if I can help it. This is a massive loss in terms of marketing.
• jobs_throwaway 4y ago
  Bummer. It was a small thing but I enjoyed seeing the donations I generated tick up over time. It will feel weird to not type in 'smile.amazon' everytime I go to the site now
• up2isomorphism 4y ago
  Donation works sometimes but it does not work in the US in general because I rarely see lack of physical material is a problem for US, it is the community culture and public safety that usually cut all the hope of these people.
• garfieldnate 4y ago
  I honestly really dislike the reasoning they gave. As a customer I don't care if Amazon's impact is spread too thin; in fact, I'm happy with that. I don't trust them to choose their own impact. I, as the customer, want to choose the impact, an AmazonSmile empowered me to do that.
• NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  [flagged]
• nicklevin 4y ago
  There were seemingly odd hoops for customers to jump through to have their purchases qualify for Smile. Didn't type in the 'smile' URL? Too bad, no donation for you. One of the oddest was requiring push notifications in order for mobile purchases to count (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233815).
  • drumttocs8 4y ago
    That’s because smile was invented as a way to bypass having to pay Google for the referral link; incentivize people to retype the link before actually buying it was the ultimate goal.
  • snuxoll 4y ago
    They wanted you to turn on push on mobile so they could pollute your Lock Screen with ads. I did it and promptly set iOS to deliver them silently because it got really annoying, but it was an easy way for the EFF to get some money from purchases I was making anyway.
    • deelowe 4y ago
      I'm honestly surprised smile went on for as long as it did. It always seemed so out of character for Amazon.
      • __blockcipher__ 4y ago
        It was also in this weird spot where they wanted to use it for PR but simultaneously wanted to shove it beneath the floorboards so people won’t mass adopt it.
    • mgarfias 4y ago
      Yep, i was pretty pissed when they started that
    • crazysim 4y ago
      On android they did the asshole thing and detected if the notifications were disabled and turned off smile. No ios hiding the true notification state there.
• ianai 4y ago
  This honestly infuriates me. Thanks for raising the cost of prime while squandering any reason to shop with you.
• gck1 4y ago
  Well, that's unfortunate. I've been using Chrome redirector extension and all my Amazon orders were automatically smile-eligible, with Signal Foundation receiving all of it. This was probably the easiest, most hassle-free and cheapest (as in - free) way to support organizations.
• encryptluks2 4y ago
  Amazon actively made choices to prevent purchases from contributing towards Smile donations. You had to type the URL and make the purchase from smile.amazon.com. When they say that the program has not grown to create the impact that they had originally hoped, it is a complete fabrication. It did not grow because they made choices to prevent it.
• ferminaut 4y ago
  > All US charities have received $400,026,236.70 as of December 2022. $400 million in donations to charities and Amazon has the gall to say "the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped."
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • TMWNN 4y ago
    One million eligible recipients around the world, according to Amazon, so $400 per recipient over the decade the program has existed.
    • kelnos 4y ago
      That's the average, sure, but since Amazon allows each customer to pick a charity, I imagine some charities got a lot more, and some a lot less. According to my account page, I've generated $100.71 for the charity I selected, and, overall, they've received $273.64 as a part of the program. So I guess the charity I selected wasn't all that popular. But I expect other, more mainstream charities, were.
      • atomicnumber3 4y ago
        The FSF has received almost 35k. That's not bad imo.
        • indrora 4y ago
          Amazon (via Smile) and Microsoft (via employee donations) are probably the two biggest funding sources for the FSF.
          • jyap 4y ago
            Their patrons page says otherwise: https://www.fsf.org/patrons https://www.fsf.org/patrons “Patron pages for past fiscal years” section
• justapassenger 4y ago
  Very nice corporate speak for “our financials look bad for 2023, so we’re canceling program that’s eating our margins”.
  • sokoloff 4y ago
    It might be worse than that. I’m cookied into some affiliate or other for Amazon essentially all the time. I always assumed Smile was mostly a way for Amazon to get me to direct that to a charity instead of a stale affiliate link.
    • dealforager 4y ago
      Smile and affiliate commissions are separate. So in your example both the charity and the stale affiliate link would receive a cut that is independent of the other. Source: I run an affiliate site and my links always direct to Smile, and I keep getting commissions.
      • gnicholas 4y ago
        Is it possible that by linking to smile, your amount is reduced by the smile amount, or that it operates differently when the affiliate link happens first and the smile insertion happens second?
    • lyrrad 4y ago
      I've been donating to charities through affiliate links and Smile for a while. Whenever I plan to make a purchase I go to the smile.amazon.com URL while also appending a charity's affiliate link (e.g. "/?tag=AFFILIATE-ID") to the URL. I think charities will still get a significant amount from my purchases, since AmazonSmile was only 0.5%, while affiliate links for many categories are 4% or higher.
• QuinnyPig 4y ago
  "Amazon shutters unprofitable philanthropic program." I particularly like that the email I got addresses me (despite the many tens of thousands of dollars I've spent through Amazon over the past two decades) as lower-case "customer." My default position on the various AWS keynotes about the power of data / personalization is "you first, buddy."
• iambateman 4y ago
  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.
  • abirch 4y ago
    It makes it easier to say goodbye. I wish Shopify or Google had an easier way to buy anything their. I'm downloading my pictures and cancelling prime.
  • gedy 4y ago
    Yeah it's a bummer, we used it to donate to our local charter school.
    • jvnnmfjvfjvflkj 4y ago
      What prevents you from donating to your local charter school without Amazon Smile?
      • gedy 4y ago
        We do, it's just "free money" basically
      • saxonww 4y ago
        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.
• quanticle 4y ago
  I'm sad, but unsurprised to see Amazon Smile go. Retail isn't exactly high margin to begin with, and Amazon has made a specialty of squeezing what margin remained. As Jeff Bezos said, "Your margin is my opportunity." So, when Amazon announced Smile, I was very surprised that they weren't adding a surcharge for the donation, but rather where making the donation out of whatever margin they earned on the product. I guess with the current economic downturn, Amazon has decided that there is insufficient margin to continue taking a cut out and donating it to charity.
  • danaris 4y ago
    Some retail isn't high margin, that's absolutely true. Some retail has a 75%+ markup as standard at the store. That's why they're able to regularly offer sales where they take 25%, 50%, even 75% off: it's not just to clear out unsold inventory; many retailers that do this are still making a profit at those prices. Amazon, being a "sell everything and more" retailer, certainly doesn't get to enjoy those high profit margins for all their products, but they also definitely do not have to deal with the razor-thin margins of other sectors across the board. They get to average it out nicely somewhere in the middle.
    • quanticle 4y ago
      Some retail has a 75%+ markup as standard at the store. That's why they're able to regularly offer sales where they take 25%, 50%, even 75% off: it's not just to clear out unsold inventory; many retailers that do this are still making a profit at those prices. But how many of those items actually sell at the sticker price? The reason I ask is because I've noticed this with mechanical watches (which I have a moderate interest in). Mechanical watches will often have absurd sticker prices. Two, or even three times the final sale price is quite common. But do any of those watches actually sell at those prices? Does anyone actually spend a thousand dollars for, e.g. a Hamilton automatic which has a selling price of roughly $400 on Amazon, and elsewhere? I very much doubt it. The sticker price is just there to add prestige and the sale price, for all intents and purposes, is the actual price. Similarly, clothing often has some ridiculous sticker price, because the entire point of the sticker price is to be marked down in one of the seemingly perpetual sales that retailers have. I remember that J.C. Penney, when they hired Apple head of retail Ron Johnson, tried to change this practice, by setting the list price of clothing closer to the price that they paid, eschewing having sales. It was a disaster [1]. Customers had become accustomed to seeing large markdowns, and when those markdowns weren't there, they waited (or shopped at other retailers which continued to offer markdowns). Just because the sticker price has a 75% (or 2-300%, in the case of watches) markup doesn't mean the retailer actually expects to make that margin on anything except a small fraction of sales. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/02/24/a-strategic-mistake-that-still-haunts-jc-penney/?sh=51861dc61bcf https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/02/24/a...
• m00x 4y ago
  Amazon treats their engineers so poorly that they have to set up training pipelines directly into middle schools. Maybe they think they can make them drink the kool-aid before they grow their critical thinking skills.
• vyrotek 4y ago
  Unfortunate. It was a decent source of donations for the schools in my area here in AZ.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  One of my favorite things about AmazonSmile is that I got the pick the charities based on what I considered important. Many times charity giving by companies can have different motivations (an example is Microsoft "donating" Windows and Office to schools so that that is what kids grow up more comfortable with). By being able to choose who go the donations, it felt empowering and less likely the company was using charity to pursue secondary interests.
• vwcx 4y ago
  It's amazing to look at the AmazonSmile form 990. It's a 2000 page pdf with a list of every charity that received a donation along with the amount: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/462626883/09_2019_prefixes_45-46%2F462626883_201812_990PF_2019091716657143 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/46262...
  • orf 4y ago
    The vast majority of those 1 million organizations received less than 100 dollars.
    • giancarlostoro 4y ago
      I suppose, it does bring me joy that a local no-kill shelter got $42,631.17 and I was able to get about $30 into that, its not ground breaking, but that's kind of the point of smile right. I guess I can donate out of my own pocket to the same shelter moving forward.
      • ugh123 4y ago
        I wonder if some of these places were just really really good about advertising and asking their customers/community to give them a nod in their Prime accounts.
        • giancarlostoro 4y ago
          I'm not sure, but one of their locations did suffer from a fire within the past year, and they got enough donations to rebuild within a few short days, around that time I changed my Amazon Smile donation, I assume others thought the same thing I thought around that time window. It will be a shame that Amazon will take away donations from so many good places. I know I can donate myself directly, but it was far more meaningful that Amazon was doing so as you ordered things.
        • vxNsr 4y ago
          actually amazon was the main advertiser for the top charities on the list, when you went to sign up st jude's was the recommended charity
• patwolf 4y ago
  I now reflexively start typing smile.amazon.com instead of amazon.com into the url bar. Hopefully the smile url will continue to work because it's going to take me a while to unlearn.
  • kgwxd 4y ago
    I think it would bad PR if they just redirect to www, people that think they're still generating money for charity wouldn't be too happy once they figure it out. I've personally chosen Amazon Smile specifically because of the donations when there were plenty of other options I would rather use if I'm not getting anything out of buying from Amazon. I'm sure I wouldn't notice if it just redirected.
    • Turing_Machine 4y ago
      I got an email notice that the program was ending. I expect everyone who's used Smile also got one.
• Metacelsus 4y ago
  One fewer reason to buy things on Amazon.
• synergy20 4y ago
  Just got the email, that's sad. There are some charities might be dependent on this every year. Now my Amazon purchases become less interesting.
• TheEnder8 4y ago
  This is really about cost-cutting. If Amazon felt it were about being spread too thin, the obvious solution is to make a short list of charities. Or increase the amount donated.
• Brendinooo 4y ago
  Big effective altruism vibes here. Bummer for the little guys.
• nikolay 4y ago
  Sad although I am not worried much. I am turning our Smile program materials to Amazon Associates alongside a browser addon, and we'll make more!
• everybodyknows 4y ago
  One more month for charity-shopping: > ... wind down AmazonSmile by February 20, 2023
• GoodJokes 4y ago
  [dead]
• shepherdjerred 4y ago
  While it's sad to see this program close, I feel like backlash isn't the answer. How are companies supposed to create beneficial programs like this if they know they're expected to keep it forever?
  • dylan604 4y ago
    By starting a program and saying "for the next x amount of time, this is what we're doing".
    • shepherdjerred 4y ago
      That's not a bad idea. I wonder if companies do this today. I expect cynical HN commenters would make the similarly snarky comments about how X company is only committing to Y time period.
      • wccrawford 4y ago
        Yeah, they would. But if Amazon committed to Smile for 2 years, then they could say "We're re-upping our commitment for 2 more years" every 2 years, bringing even more PR for it. And when it ended, there would still be some outrage, but probably not as much.
      • dylan604 4y ago
        Most people only "give" when the bells ring outside the stores their buying gifts for others, so they're already used to "giving" during a window.
  • FroshKiller 4y ago
    They seem pretty committed to pursuing profit forever. I would simply make it a part of my mission and have the integrity to stick to it.
    • shepherdjerred 4y ago
      Every company, even the "good" ones, are committed to pursuing profit, at least to some extent. That's the _entire_ point of a company.
• hobbitstan 4y ago
  So it looks like animal charities are out then. A local shelter was my chosen charity. Saying that, I only generated $70 of donations with 300 orders so it wasn't much, but every little helps. The fact that they're axing this at a time of mass layoffs makes me think they're not telling the truth.
• woodruffw 4y ago
  I've managed to successfully boycott Amazon for about 3 years at this point, with very sparing business expenses that I'd do through AmazonSmile to "offset" my use of Amazon. It's good to know that that option will no longer be available to me, meaning that I will no longer have any excuse to do business with Amazon!
• yawnr 4y ago
  This is horrendous and is going to take away huge amounts of money from charities that rely on it. Charities that customers care about, not Amazon executives. The charity I support is the ASPCA, which gets significant funding from Smile and it’s going to translate directly into fewer animals getting care. Shitty.
• jaggederest 4y ago
  I like that fully a third of their "charitable" targets are seeking ways to create a better environment for Amazon itself. Funding affordable housing in Seattle and training more software engineers both.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    Why pay salaries when you can make “big” donations instead?
• ericpauley 4y ago
  This honestly might be a net good if everyone complaining buys less plastic junk on Amazon as a result. To me the program always felt like a lot of recycling: a way to make people feel better about unsustainable overconsumption.
• DeepYogurt 4y ago
  Amazon smile is what made me start using amazon excessively. I'm going to wind down that excess now.
• Acrobatic_Road 4y ago
  If you buy stuff in person you'll save money and will have more to donate to your favorite causes.
• dylan604 4y ago
  soooo, are they going to change their logo?
• pjsg 4y ago
  I never understood how Amazon decided which orders qualified for Smile -- but now (too late) I know. It turns out that I only contributed $1.29 -- but my charity (EFF) received over $1M. I guess that this indicates that they did some good outreach at one point.
  • jxramos 4y ago
    what, it wasn't uniform across the board for all sales? Qualifying orders, where was that detail ever communicated?
    • jxramos 4y ago
      Wow never knew about any of this before """ Your total orders The number you see here is the total number of eligible orders you’ve placed at smile.amazon.com on your web browser or with AmazonSmile activated in the Amazon Shopping app on your iOS or Android phone, since the first time you selected a charity at smile.amazon.com. This total may take several days to update after your order ships. Look for the AmazonSmile badge in Your Orders to see which of your orders have supported charity. https://smile.amazon.com/charity/my-impact?ref_=nav_cs_smile https://smile.amazon.com/charity/my-impact?ref_=nav_cs_smile """ """ Which products on AmazonSmile are eligible for charitable donations? Tens of millions of products on AmazonSmile are eligible for donations. You will see eligible products marked “Eligible for AmazonSmile donation” on their product detail pages. Recurring Subscribe-and-Save purchases and subscription renewals are not currently eligible. https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/about/ref=smi_se_dshb_leli_saas#products https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/about/ref=smi_se_dshb_leli_... """
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Amazon doesn’t have any employee match programs, but they had AmazonSmile. This matched their Customer Obsession leadership principle in a very smart way. Rather than making their charitable giving be directed by a foundation or employees, it let customers decide what mattered to them. They highlight their charitable programs as a way of justifying the end of the Smile program. But those existed when Smile existed. It’s not a zero sum game as they imply. They took away an avenue customers got value out of, probably disproportionate to the value the charities received frankly, and that’s the end of the story. A sad day for customer obsession.
  • astrange 4y ago
    Well, it let customers decide as long as those customers enabled ads on their phone, remembered to visit smile.amazon every time, and re-enrolled in the program every year when it turned itself off. It was pretty clearly designed to stop you from using it.
    • jxramos 4y ago
      what's this bit about re-enrolling? You had to reenroll your charitable organization you wanted to contribute to each year?
    • fnordpiglet 4y ago
      I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Other than ordering from smile, which was admitted a naked attempt to drive down use, none of what you said occurred to me. I’ve been using smile since it started.
      • astrange 4y ago
        You absolutely had to re-enroll something… https://smile.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=15576745011 https://smile.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=15576745011 Ah, looks like it was only for the phone app. It makes you re-enroll twice a year. On the website of course you have to remember to go there every time, unless you got a browser extension.
• sn_master 4y ago
  I chose a charity but then barely ever donated anything because I would always forget to type the smile in the URL. It was a blatant technique to discourage donations.
• s1mon 4y ago
  It's often not a surprise when I read about something that's been around for a while which is closing down, and a) it's something I should be likely to run into, either because it's where I live, or it has something to do with things that I follow regularly, and b) I've never heard of it. This happens with restaurants where I live, and it happens with tech companies or features or divisions of companies. If your thing isn't getting noticed in the mass media or the social media, then it's unlikely to be as successful as things that are getting noticed. You don't even have to spend money on advertising or PR - as Tesla has shown - you just have to make a name for yourself somehow (not that Tesla is how I would do anything).
• kgwxd 4y ago
  Guess I'll just have to start donating to The Satanic Temple directly :/ And start shopping elsewhere when possible. The only reason Amazon was ever my first stop was because of Smile.
• Shank 4y ago
  According to Amazon, I generated $326.89 in donations. I feel good enough about this impact to have installed Smile Always on all of my browsers and resisted using the mobile app entirely. It’s not super impactful but it’s still kinda sad to see it go. I think based on the Amazon’s statement, which states that it didn’t have the desired impact, they could’ve just rolled it out as the default. The reality is that it’s now 5% back to Amazon and you can trivially calculate that back in missed profits they didn’t get. Belt tightening or legitimate disappointment with the impact?
• spullara 4y ago
  Hmm. I always though smile.amazon.com was mostly to dodge having to pay affiliates by switching the domain and losing the cookies. I did donate a couple hundred bucks through it though :(
• anikom15 4y ago
  I sent an email to amazon-ir@amazon.com stating that I will cancel my Prime account, Business account, and credit card on February 20th. It’s annoying having to go to different sites for goods, but I think I can manage. The charity I contributed to got the email and won’t be using Amazon as a vendor any longer.
• avsteele 4y ago
  In addition to the criticism raised by others: just look at the new list of 'approved' charities. Holy cow. Talk about ineffective altruism! Obligatory Links: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/14/charity-isnt-about-helping/ https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/14/charity-isnt-about-help... https://www.amazon.com/The-Elephant-in-Brain-audiobook/dp/B07H8K4G9G/ https://www.amazon.com/The-Elephant-in-Brain-audiobook/dp/B0...
  • fwipsy 4y ago
    Notice one of the charities is building affordable housing in their "hometown communities." I wonder how much of that housing will go to underpaid Amazon laborers?
    • astrange 4y ago
      The poorest people in the US are nonworkers (elderly and children) not Amazon workers. And Amazon workers' pay has significantly increased in the last few years. If you think they're not paying enough, I have a simple solution - actually have a Washington state income tax.
• propogandist 4y ago
  Amazon is working hard to improve gross margins so they are cutting this service. Now they get to keep more profits vs having to share their margins with charities whenever someone uses a smile.amazon link
• jmbwell 4y ago
  No need to be sad, though. Look at what Amazon donated to your charity from your purchases, then just go give that amount directly to them next year. And then quit buying on Amazon. Everyone wins!
  • bombcar 4y ago
    This is basically it. Prime has gone to absolute shit (Walmart and Target beat them on delivery AND quality now), and this may have been the last thing keeping me on the platform.
    • jxramos 4y ago
      what's up with shipping, it's so inconsistent. Are they testing their customers patience or something? It's getting to the point where I'm considering starting a spreadsheet to quantify how poor the experience has been of late.
      • hasbot 4y ago
        USPS, FedEx, or UPS? USPS is soo erratic and it's not Amazon's fault. I just received a USPS package not from Amazon four days after the initial delivery estimate. It sat at a distribution center for two days.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        For me where I am they use UPS and once they actually ship it gets here in a few days, but even prime orders don't seem to bother leaving the warehouse for a week or more (for in-stock things). It's like every order is now "Amazon day orders" or something.
        • jxramos 4y ago
          yah they play the whole get a $2 digital credit or whatever for orders. It kind of blurs the expectations too when now it's becoming the norm for things not to meet the 2day shipping expectations that is prime. Things are also blurred in the opposite direction with same day shipping or one day shipping on certain items. It's the inconsistency that's confusing and kind of invites you to stop guessing and just patiently wait like the old days of ordering something through the mail.
• boomboomsubban 4y ago
  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 fourth is disaster relief, which I'm less cynical about though I am reminded of their recent tornado issue. What a charitable company.
  • amadeuspagel 4y ago
    I'm not sure what your problem here is. It's good that amazon has some incentive to do these things well and to do them longterm, to make sure that housing actually gets build, to make sure that kids actually learn computer science. This is much better then a one-time donation to some trendy charity for good PR.
  • grantc 4y ago
    The 20,000 families benefitting from housing in the Seattle metro area as a result of Amazon's investments in the community might define charitable vs. non-charitable differently than you. I've personally met the women and children benefitting from the $100M Amazon and its employees have donated to Mary's Place -- their lens is not yours. Your comments about AFE are a bit underdeveloped. File under no good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.
    • adave 4y ago
      Its good but probably not the most effective or most wanted by customers which is what that point was with these donations.
    • bombolo 4y ago
      Wow they are investing in real estate! How generous!
    • boomboomsubban 4y ago
      Building houses is a good thing, but you could make the project a for profit division of Amazon and I don't think what they're doing would drastically change. Similar with their education program, some of it would change but I bet the base project could be seen as a worthwhile investment in the companies future. Saying these acts justify ending smile is silly.
• jonahhorowitz 4y ago
  This is such good news. The Burning Man nonprofit in particular was a huge problem. They used to highlight lots of small vendors who sold cool stuff for building art projects, but then the shifted entirely to sending people to amazon for the smile money and away from small vendors. Hopefully this change will shift things back in a better direction.
• ErikVandeWater 4y ago
  My guess is amongst the people who set up and used Amazon Smile, the vast majority maintained the belief that Amazon is closer to evil than it is to good. Smarter for Amazon to pick and choose which charities to spend on so it can virtue signal to the more gullible.
• beders 4y ago
  > However, after almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations—more than 1 million globally—our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin. What BS is this? Can we have the real reason?
  • wccrawford 4y ago
    While I'm sure this isn't the real reason, I could see that the accounting and check-cutting for 1 million organizations will have an noticeable impact on the amounts they're giving to each organization, especially the ones that get almost nothing. Others have already suggested cutting the list of charities down to a manageable number, perhaps from the list of charities that got the most interest already. I suspect this would end up producing bad PR from their curated list, so they've decided to just pick a handful and be done. But again, I suspect there was more to this and we'll never know the real reason.
  • freeAgent 4y ago
    I assume this will simply allow them to increase their margins by eliminating what was, essentially, their special affiliate program for charities.
  • jxramos 4y ago
    I'd love to see a spreadsheet of each of the participating organizations and hear their take on it.
• BadCookie 4y ago
  I’m not defending Amazon here because I don’t think they are doing it for the right reasons, but I wonder if direct donations to charities might actually go up enough to more than compensate for this change. I was ashamed recently when I learned how little the charity I support was actually getting from the Smile program. The Smile program let me feel good about supporting the charity while remaining woefully ignorant of how little the charity was getting in return. If I donate directly, I will know more acutely how much (or how little) good I am doing.
• scardycat 4y ago
  It's a shame this is closing. I love this program and more importantly, our local school PTO is a beneficiary and will feel the loss of this program. Having said that, I am sure there are people misusing this and its a burden on Amazon to make sure they are not funding / supporting malicious users. I get it but closing it is not a solution.
• Eleison23 4y ago
  [dead]
• gordon_freeman 4y ago
  This is disappointing news. I automated my donations to Signal Tech Foundation (the non-profit behind the Signal chat app) through purchases at Amazon. Now I will just need to directly donate to them separately.
• ugh123 4y ago
  It would be interesting to see if Amazon were to add more give-some-to-charity options to their cart checkout process, if people would be just as willing to add that spend (or more) to their total. I think theirs a big opportunity for charities with not a lot of risk to AMZN.
• nfpsupporter 4y ago
  I am saddened by this news. No doubt the charities they select are the same ones that can afford to buy TV ads, magazine ads, internet ads, and direct mail advertising. What a great way to spend the donations! Meanwhile, the smaller nonprofit organizations that have no advertising budget, no payroll, no employee benefits, etc. that run on a shoestring budget will never miss the measly $1000 a year that Amazon Smile generated, right? If they were serious amount making a significant impact, they would allow for donations to the smaller organizations that spend virtually every dollar on their programs rather than huge salaries and elaborate holiday parties that larger nonprofits can afford. If you are interested, IRS provides copies of tax returns for many US-based charities. Look at the bigger ones to see where your donations are actually being spent, and the large sums they have in their bank and investment accounts.
• theGnuMe 4y ago
  Wow… Amazon must really be hurting to cut something like this off… maybe they need to ask Mackenzie for some money.
• irrational 4y ago
  Well, crap. Often when I had a choice of where to purchase something, I would go with Amazon to support my chosen charity. Amazon is crazy thinking this won’t impact them negatively.
• webworker 4y ago
  Darn. I used to do smile and have the donations sent to haiku.
• snailmailman 4y ago
  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.
  • Nexxxeh 4y ago
    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.
    • snailmailman 4y ago
      It was impossible last I had checked, but looking now I guess they enabled it on iPhone some time in 2020? But it required enabling push notifications? I’ve always added items to my cart, then finished the purchase on desktop to use smile. I can’t currently find anything about it in the app. Either it has already been removed or its very difficult to find.
• aksss 4y ago
  Amazon probably would just rather direct its own charitable giving than manage an allow/block list and field complaints about why X is platformed and Y is not. This is why we can’t have nice things. ..And yeah, also it was (more) annoying to use when you just want to get in and out like it’s a dirty Walgreens. Solid effort though, Amerzon.
• ornornor 4y ago
  It always seemed too good to be true given how greedy, cynical, and dehumanizing Bezos’ money machine is. 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 :)
• doubtfuluser 4y ago
  All the projects they mention going on after the wind-down are US centric. Will they do anything outside of the US, too?