I feel like we need pinned comment every time this comes up because the mythology around this topic is so pervasive.
Donating small amounts along with a purchase saves a lot on transaction cost for the non profit organization.
Non profits love these things for volume.
Stores do not make money offering these.
If you dislike being pressured to donate at POS, by all means don’t do it, I don’t either!
Not only that, but most corporations like these match the donations, so you are donating 1$, they are donating 60k$.
I want potatoe coupons!
Infuriates me as well. I don’t think they realize how it looks and sounds in 2026.
OP doing the classic “this is a thing in my country/city/whatever and that means it must be the same for the rest of the world” with that title. I’ve never even heard about this before. It’s not a thing in any shops I’ve ever been too, both in my own country and other countries I’ve been to. In my country the only similar experience is when you go to a store and use the machine for recycling cans and plastic bottles, you get a choice to donate the money directly to “children of the world” which is part of a national organisation that works to improve the rights and access to healt care, schools and safety for kids all around the world.
Ok then, sound out if your country does this:
- definitely seen it in multiple stores in Australia
Seen in Canada
I’ve been given the “corporations should be able to run their business how they want and government shouldn’t ban things like they banned weed” too many times on lemmy.
We should ban for profit corporations from doing certain things, this is one of them. We know they’re using the money as a tax writeoff. Ban this shit. Not everything is drugs.
And they get credit for donating even tho it was actually their customers.
They do not get credit for facilitating your donation. This is a misunderstanding of how donating works based on when I looked it up after saying the same thing. They do it mainly to virtue signal. Either way I share the sentiment of the post.
In many cases they also cause the child hunger by paying their employees a wage so low that food assistance is required.
If only in the form of a tax break. You’re literally donating to the company asking for the cash.
They are, using your money so they can get the tax right off…
um that’s illegal. I mean your spelling of “write off”, but also that charity deduction thing, that’s not true.
This feels like you consciously made errors just to irritate people. What’s with the random comma? And “tax right off”… seriously?
“Right off” is an error, but the sentense parses if you replace the comma with a dash
I often pass an intersection where a woman is selling ice cold water bottles, and in the other direction, her husband (I assume) is selling flowers. I almost always buy 2 bottles of water from her.
I know that my money is going directly to help a hard working family, instead of some “charity,” where only about 20% goes to the actual research, while executives take millions in compensation.
If it could be verified that they at least matched donations, they might have better luck
That money is going to pedophiles who will in return feed the children
I give $2 to the fold bank every time I shop at the grocery store. I know how it feels to be hungry. I mean actually hungry.
If the thousand people who showed up that day also gave $2, that would amount to so much more.
Are you telling me it’s more important to resent the grocery store for making money than it is to feed the hungry?
What happens down here:
Youe donation goes to Freddies Fart Fund, which is not a registered charity (so you can’t claim it as a deduction) but a sub company of Freddy Fishmongers
Freddy Fishmongers then donates to a registered charity and claims the deduction…after their Fart Fund takes its cut to cover processing and administration of course…
Donations straight to a charity do a lot of good. That’s not what these guys are doing.
As far as the world knows, they did. It was the $20 you gave them.
and you didn’t give them $20 so they had to let the orphans starve, nothing they could do.
I’ve been saying this for years.
Well they will make the donation, but they’ll do it with your money, and then they’ll take the tax deduction for it, and reward themselves with a nice fat end of year bonus from the tax savings. Isn’t capitalism fun?
That’s not how tax deductions work. All the write-offs allow is for them to not count the money donated as income, so they make the same amount of money on the sale whether or not you donate.
The benefit to the company is PR or donating to a non-profit with a mission that aligns with their corporate goals. For instance, Bass Pro may ask you to donate to wildlands preservation non-profits that maintain environments in which people fish and hunt.
But isn’t it true that whatever they don’t pay in taxes via writeoffs, they get to keep and use however they want? They might choose not to give themselves a bigger bonus with those savings on taxes, but…I do doubt it for some reason
Write-offs are deductions from income, not reductions in taxes owed. They only get to deduct the taxes they would have paid if they had kept the donations.
Let’s imagine their annual income was $10,000,000. Their nominal tax rate would have them owing $2,100,000.
If they received a $100,000 in donations, that would make their income 10,100,000. But with the donations they could write off the 100 grand, reducing their tax bill by $21,000, for a total of $2,100,000.
Either way, they pay the same in taxes with or without the donations.
It ends up being net zero. They’re only writing off the money you donated. They still have to count the money you donated towards their overall revenue, increasing their tax bill, but then they pass the donation on, allowing them to write it off, reducing their overall revenue (and thus their tax bill) to what it would have been if you hadn’t donated.
If they donate money out of their own profits, they CAN write that off. Which of course is also money you gave them, except it’s money you gave them in order to buy their products, not for the purpose of having them donate it.
