19 ms·

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

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.
  - Rebelgecko 4y ago
    Wouldn't that cost money?
anikom15 4y ago
Honest? Why should we believe all of the Amazon smile purchases will continue and contribute to charity? If the program is getting scrapped, are we to believe Amazon is going to send 0.5% of everyone’s purchases to charity? This is an attempt to recover revenue, nothing more.
- gretch 4y ago
  Just look at other companies. Here's Meta as an example https://about.meta.com/giving-together/ 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-giving-season/#:~:text=money%20long%2Dterm.-,When%20you%20sign%20up%20to%20donate%20monthly%20to%20a%20nonprofit,in%20total%20across%20all%20organizations https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/fundraise-for-nonprofits-g....
  - anikom15 4y ago
    Sorry, I don’t really understand what you’re talking about. My point is they are trying to sugarcoat this as focusing on specific charities, whereas I believe total donation dollars is going to drop. In addition, I think Amazon is hoping to save on costs having to manage AmazonSmile itself.
    - Zanni 4y ago
      I suspect that saving the cost of managing AmazonSmile is the primary motivator. That's a lot of overhead! Two thousand pages of charities, most of which are collecting less than $30. I'd bet there are hundreds, if not thousands, of charities that Amazon was paying more to manage collection/disbursement than the actual charity received. (Or maybe not--there seems to be a minimum payout of $5.00, starting on page 1881.)
      - thrill 4y ago
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
> …but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. Or, a less cynical take is that they really can have more impact by focusing on fewer charities. Another commenter posted Amazon Smile's Form 990 from 2018 [1], the most recent year on Pro Publica's website that has a full listing of all the charities that received funds. The total PDF is 2121 pages long, and the list of charities starts on page 18. They made about $37.5 million in total donations that year. The top charity, the ASPCA, received $1.8 million that year (note that the ASPCA had total revenue of $267.7 million that year). But the main point is that the charity on the top of the second page, which is only about 100 charities from the top (ordered by total amount received) received just over $10,000, and the charity at the top of the third page received $5659. And there are still over 2100 pages of charities to go! So it seems imminently reasonable to me that, rather than give a couple hundred bucks a year to thousands and thousands and thousands of charities, to instead consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good. 1. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/462626883/09_2019_prefixes_45-46%2F462626883_201812_990PF_2019091716657143 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/46262...
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Couldn't they just make the charity list much shorter? While still giving users a choice?
- jzb 4y ago
  But smaller organizations will be missed entirely. My charity is a cat shelter in St. Louis. I’d rather they get my cut than a larger charity that means less to me and has bigger fundraising machinery.
  - freilanzer 4y ago
    I mean, you can always just donate 10$ a month to them, which will probably be much more than a tiny cat shelter gets from Amazon Smile.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    I'd encourage you to ask the shelter how much they get from Amazon Smile. My guess is it's $200-300 max, which is barely enough to save a single cat. Worse, there is a well-known phenomenon [1] where if people's "guilt" is taken away, then they are less likely to donate overall. That is, for at least some portion of people, they probably mark a small charity as their Amazon Smile recipient and then think "Great, I'm donating to charity!", not realizing their donations are like 50 cents. But if they didn't sign up for Amazon Smile they might be more likely to actually donate a real amount. To be clear, I'm all for small charities getting money, but I'd almost rather it be like a lottery or something so a smaller number of small charities could get money they could actually do something with. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...
saxonww 4y ago
I had already canceled my Prime membership and started shopping elsewhere. I'm not exactly outraged by this news - although I did always buy through Smile - but I'm now doubly sure Amazon won't be my first choice going forward.
- ferminaut 4y ago
  I think a lot of folks can get by without a Prime membership. My prime subscription ended almost a year ago now and I don't miss it. Amazon shipping has got progressively slower as time went on. Prime video is terrible UX with subpar content. At $15 a month it just isnt worth it. I've now opted for the "free" shipping that you get when you spend $25+. Items that I cannot wait for I will buy local, which usually now offer same day delivery.
  - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
    > Amazon shipping has got progressively slower as time went on. While there are definitely periods where I would have agreed with you, recently Amazon has seriously increased the % of products which are deliverable same day. It's also not just for common items. I can buy a thermocouple amplifier board and have it delivered today. It really scratches an itch when you can get components for a project delivered THAT DAY. I could be playing with thermocouples TODAY. Hard to resist. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FZZ2FDK https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FZZ2FDK
  - sli 4y ago
    Cancelling my Prime membership a few years ago made it immediately clear that all I was paying for was to not have my package sit in the warehouse for an extra 3-4 days before making it to my house in two days anyway. I also started getting shipments coming from warehouses on the other side of the country, something that never happened while I was paying for Prime. Immediately clear that the benefits for ordering were entirely artificial.
    - murderfs 4y ago
      > I also started getting shipments coming from warehouses on the other side of the country, something that never happened while I was paying for Prime. That doesn't sound entirely artificial to me, though? It seems more likely that they're reserving stock in closer (and likely, more expensive) warehouses for people who are paying for two day shipping, either by having a Prime membership or by paying for the shipping.
nimbius 4y ago
"The fun part of Amazon Smile was that it let customers decide how they wanted to change the world" The corporate justification part of amazon smile was in the same effort as any charity in purchase which is to make the consumer feel empowered, righteous and moral for the decision to consume a product. Charity tie ins like rainforest donations or carbon offsets are designed to incense consumers to evangelize. They're designed to eliminate buyers remorse returns and blunt the often ever present reality of sweat shop labor. That anyone got real money from this is just a happy side effect.
javajosh 4y ago
>This is surprisingly honest for corporatespeak 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

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.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  Wouldn't that cost money?

anikom15 4y ago

Honest? Why should we believe all of the Amazon smile purchases will continue and contribute to charity? If the program is getting scrapped, are we to believe Amazon is going to send 0.5% of everyone’s purchases to charity? This is an attempt to recover revenue, nothing more.

gretch 4y ago
Just look at other companies. Here's Meta as an example https://about.meta.com/giving-together/ 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-giving-season/#:~:text=money%20long%2Dterm.-,When%20you%20sign%20up%20to%20donate%20monthly%20to%20a%20nonprofit,in%20total%20across%20all%20organizations https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/fundraise-for-nonprofits-g....
- anikom15 4y ago
  Sorry, I don’t really understand what you’re talking about. My point is they are trying to sugarcoat this as focusing on specific charities, whereas I believe total donation dollars is going to drop. In addition, I think Amazon is hoping to save on costs having to manage AmazonSmile itself.
  - Zanni 4y ago
    I suspect that saving the cost of managing AmazonSmile is the primary motivator. That's a lot of overhead! Two thousand pages of charities, most of which are collecting less than $30. I'd bet there are hundreds, if not thousands, of charities that Amazon was paying more to manage collection/disbursement than the actual charity received. (Or maybe not--there seems to be a minimum payout of $5.00, starting on page 1881.)
    - thrill 4y ago

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

> …but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much. Or, a less cynical take is that they really can have more impact by focusing on fewer charities. Another commenter posted Amazon Smile's Form 990 from 2018 [1], the most recent year on Pro Publica's website that has a full listing of all the charities that received funds. The total PDF is 2121 pages long, and the list of charities starts on page 18. They made about $37.5 million in total donations that year. The top charity, the ASPCA, received $1.8 million that year (note that the ASPCA had total revenue of $267.7 million that year). But the main point is that the charity on the top of the second page, which is only about 100 charities from the top (ordered by total amount received) received just over $10,000, and the charity at the top of the third page received $5659. And there are still over 2100 pages of charities to go! So it seems imminently reasonable to me that, rather than give a couple hundred bucks a year to thousands and thousands and thousands of charities, to instead consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good. 1. 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...

mardifoufs 4y ago
Couldn't they just make the charity list much shorter? While still giving users a choice?
jzb 4y ago
But smaller organizations will be missed entirely. My charity is a cat shelter in St. Louis. I’d rather they get my cut than a larger charity that means less to me and has bigger fundraising machinery.
- freilanzer 4y ago
  I mean, you can always just donate 10$ a month to them, which will probably be much more than a tiny cat shelter gets from Amazon Smile.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  I'd encourage you to ask the shelter how much they get from Amazon Smile. My guess is it's $200-300 max, which is barely enough to save a single cat. Worse, there is a well-known phenomenon [1] where if people's "guilt" is taken away, then they are less likely to donate overall. That is, for at least some portion of people, they probably mark a small charity as their Amazon Smile recipient and then think "Great, I'm donating to charity!", not realizing their donations are like 50 cents. But if they didn't sign up for Amazon Smile they might be more likely to actually donate a real amount. To be clear, I'm all for small charities getting money, but I'd almost rather it be like a lottery or something so a smaller number of small charities could get money they could actually do something with. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...

saxonww 4y ago

I had already canceled my Prime membership and started shopping elsewhere. I'm not exactly outraged by this news - although I did always buy through Smile - but I'm now doubly sure Amazon won't be my first choice going forward.

ferminaut 4y ago
I think a lot of folks can get by without a Prime membership. My prime subscription ended almost a year ago now and I don't miss it. Amazon shipping has got progressively slower as time went on. Prime video is terrible UX with subpar content. At $15 a month it just isnt worth it. I've now opted for the "free" shipping that you get when you spend $25+. Items that I cannot wait for I will buy local, which usually now offer same day delivery.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  > Amazon shipping has got progressively slower as time went on. While there are definitely periods where I would have agreed with you, recently Amazon has seriously increased the % of products which are deliverable same day. It's also not just for common items. I can buy a thermocouple amplifier board and have it delivered today. It really scratches an itch when you can get components for a project delivered THAT DAY. I could be playing with thermocouples TODAY. Hard to resist. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FZZ2FDK https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FZZ2FDK
- sli 4y ago
  Cancelling my Prime membership a few years ago made it immediately clear that all I was paying for was to not have my package sit in the warehouse for an extra 3-4 days before making it to my house in two days anyway. I also started getting shipments coming from warehouses on the other side of the country, something that never happened while I was paying for Prime. Immediately clear that the benefits for ordering were entirely artificial.
  - murderfs 4y ago
    > I also started getting shipments coming from warehouses on the other side of the country, something that never happened while I was paying for Prime. That doesn't sound entirely artificial to me, though? It seems more likely that they're reserving stock in closer (and likely, more expensive) warehouses for people who are paying for two day shipping, either by having a Prime membership or by paying for the shipping.

nimbius 4y ago

"The fun part of Amazon Smile was that it let customers decide how they wanted to change the world" The corporate justification part of amazon smile was in the same effort as any charity in purchase which is to make the consumer feel empowered, righteous and moral for the decision to consume a product. Charity tie ins like rainforest donations or carbon offsets are designed to incense consumers to evangelize. They're designed to eliminate buyers remorse returns and blunt the often ever present reality of sweat shop labor. That anyone got real money from this is just a happy side effect.

javajosh 4y ago

>This is surprisingly honest for corporatespeak 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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]