My favorite one is when our utility company asks me to donate to help pay for people’s utilities like they aren’t raking in record amount of cash.
First, please don’t link to Reddit…
Many Of The Largest Charities In America Are Giant Money Making Scams
http://thetruthwins.com/archives/many-of-the-largest-charities-in-america-are-giant-money-making-scamsThose charities have huge overhead. Very little money goes to the actual cause.
There are sites to check how much actually goes out. Check before you donate.
Remember kids, they also get to use the money they guilted off of you to reduce their tax liability because they get credit for donating your money!
This is not true. I am not from the US or a lawyer but these donations sould show up on your receipt and count as your direct donation to the charity. The store is just a middleman and does not get any benefit. Here is a random, semi recent article about it you can find a lot more if you look it up online.
I used to work for a retail chain many years ago and I do not think this is true for everywhere.
When we were asking for donations it was tracked and if our location didn’t get enough donations our store manager would get talked to by his district manager. I don’t know exactly what happened to the money once it was donated, but I don’t think they would have been so adamant about getting the donations if they didn’t make anything from it.
This was like 20 years ago though, maybe its different now.
does not get any benefitI’d say free PR is still a benefit. A bullshitter’s benefit
They do not, at least in the US.
It depends on exactly what the store is doing.
If the store is representing the extra charge as a donation to a specific charity, generally, the customer can deduct that.
If it’s far more vague, like, “Give $10 to help poor kids in Africa” the ultimate destination for the funds could be the company’s own ledgers, which it would then use for its own charitable activities and collect the tax deduction, as long as they “help poor kids in Africa.”
And some stores are just lying. CVS, for instance, was sued as part of a class action suit when, after the company pledges $10 million to the American Diabetes Association, then collected money from customers to fund that pledge.
Those donations you make can help them deduct from taxes, right?
Yes, which is why you should donate yourself if you are inclined to do so.
No, but you should still donate yourself. It allows you to focus on charities that you care the most about and which you can research as having the greatest potential positive impact.
If you give $1 to Grocery Store to donate to Cause, what happens is Grocery Store gains $1 of taxable revenue, then they remove that $1 of taxable revenue with the deduction. All the deductions do is make it so that Grocery Store neither gains nor loses money from the forwarded donations. They simply aren’t paying taxes on the money you gave them to donate.
The rules for this are good.
Here me out before accusing me of being a billionaire toady.
Not really, at least not in the US. Charitable contributions are a deduction from taxable income, not a credit, so it is still a net financial loss to donate.
Where the benefit comes is the PR and power over the organization they donate to and its sphere of influence.
It is a net loss if you donate your own money, in this situation Company isn’t donating from its own revenue. It is donating customers money.
If I donated 1000$ and claimed tax deductible it would be a net loss. But if I asked everyone for donations, raised 1000$, donated that and claimed tax deductible that wouldn’t be a net loss.
I think that’s a myth as it isn’t income it goes into a separate fund to transfer 1:1.
Even if it is revenue, it is still a net loss. All it does is reduce taxable income, which is still makes the donation a net loss. For anyone not aware, the current federal US corporate income tax rate is 21%. So if a company gives 100 dollars to charity, they only save 21 dollars in taxes, so they are still down roughly 79 dollars, depending on the state taxes of where they are incorporated.
Or just…donate the perfectly good food they constantly throw out into the cadged dumpsters designed to keep homeless people out… Litteraly would cost them nothing…
“But if we feed them then those broke homeless people won’t come in and spend their (nonexistent) money on our food!” -upper management
As much as I hate Kroger, Fred Meyer’s donates a LOT of food. Not sure about other stores but I remember a story saying they were one of the top contributors for perishables.
Just wait until you get a tip prompt on a self checkout kiosk…
Don’t tip on those things. The company supplying those things are getting the cut. And it’s mandatory. They are an office space scam.
Shell’s audacity too…
Then they will say it is more efficient to merge the donations with regular revenue and make bulk donations every quarter or something.
I hate when any company I’m buying something from does this.
People that give money for those charities are giving those companies free tax write offs.
You donate $10 or whatever. The company can then claim that $10 as a write off via donation to that charity. Campaign as a whole (either regional or national) collects $1M USD. Corporate accountants write off donation. Tax liability reduced.
That’s not how tax write offs work. The only way to claim that money in a write-off would be for the business to also claim it as revenue. That would even out, with no tax savings. Businesses also don’t handle donations that way, they usually serve as a collection agent that just passes your donations on without being able to claim it towards their revenue or their tax write offs. The only person who can write-off their donation is the person who actually made it.
The reason businesses do it is for marketing. They get to put out a press release saying “They helped donate $10 million to puppies without borders.”
That’s not how tax write offs work
Jerry: So we’re gonna make the Post Office pay for my new stereo now?
Kramer: It’s a write-off for them.
Jerry: How is it a write-off?
Kramer: They just write it off.
Jerry: Write it off what?
Kramer: Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.
Jerry: You don’t even know what a write-off is.
Kramer: Do you?
Jerry: No, I don’t.
Kramer: But they do. And they’re the ones writing it off.
Puppies do not recognize your silly imaginary borders and will commit zoomies across any such lines.
No, that’s not how it works. In order to do so, they’d have to first claim the money received as income.
That said, there are scummy things that they do. At the least, it’s saying “we [bigcorp] donated $1,000,000 to charity” when in reality all that they did was collect it. In other situations, companies like Sobey’s doesn’t actually pass on food bank donations as cash, but rather have then as credit to buy products only from Sobey’s.
I hate these donate screens because I have no idea where the donation actually goes and i don’t want to have to do a ton of research at the grocery checkout about whether its a good charity.
I have never seen a donation bin/screen/what have you that didn’t say what charity it was for.
If a business is collecting donations and then not giving them to the charities in question, that’s just fraud.
Yeah but just because they name the charity doesn’t mean its a good charity. Some charities just aren’t good ones to donate to and you’re basically just throwing money down a well when you do donate to them.
It’s still fine.
Some big international store in europe is asking to buy food from them for full price and donate it to food bank. Fuckin hilarious for making profit on charity.
I hate when they pull this shit at drive through fast food. “Would you like to round up to donate to our charity?”
Who knows what the person taking my order thinks about this charity, and what they might do to someone’s food who says no.
Edit: The fact that merely implying a fast food worker wouldn’t be a complete perfect human being gets so many downvotes says a whole lot about this community.
I can assure you that nobody working at the fast food restaurant gives a shit if you donate to charity.
How can you assure me of that lol.
You think nobody at a fast food place is capable of thinking someone is an asshole for declining to donate to charity? And then acting on that?
I used to work fast food and retail, both which forced employees to ask customers to donate at the till. We hated doing it. It is awkward for both the customer and the worker. I would get anxiety when donation drive time of year would come round, and I’d feel relief when the customer either just said no or yes, and didn’t yell at me for asking. The cashier REALLY does not care if you donate or not. And the cashier usually does not make your food, it’s usually someone else doing the cooking, and the cooks aren’t paying attention at all to whether you donated or not.
Same. I got lectured so many times by customers who insisted I was stupid for daring to ask them and acted like I had some sort of personal stake in the charity.
Then most of these same people would buy a ton of lottery tickets when I was in retail.
On the other hand, I have heard people ask that question, answered yes, and then checked my receipt later to find out that I just handed $0.57 to round out the cashier’s drawer.
If I choose to donate I will do it on my own terms thank you very much.
