My grandparents ALWAYS CALLED THIS A SCAM
Bloody Shell asked me the other day if i wanted to donate money to some shell sponsored forests. Yeah right, fuck off multinational capitalist scum
The store takes your donation, then they donate it and take all the credit.
“Store name” donated $1 million to XYZ Charity.
Not only do they get the credit, they also get tax benefits from the donation.
Update: Seems I am incorrect! Thanks for the polite discourse.
They make a dollar, they donate a dollar. No change to tax.
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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.Edit: looks like afaik its not tax deductible for corporations to do this though I would not put it past a small business or local manager to try it. I would prefer other methods for charitable donations other than how well they negotiate with box stores, etc.
I don’t know how it is in your country but last time I checked, it was not used as tax writeoff. Are you sure it is the case ? Because I hear this a lot on the internet and no one bother to check if this is true or not.
It appears as of 2021, you are correct. I still suspect funny business going on but I think you’re right about the taxes.
Edit: I do think that corporations are able to write off fees and services associated with collecting the donations such as technical and administrative costs though its likely very small in comparison to actual donations.
More likely the donations help with employee and customer retention/morale.
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.
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.
I stand corrected, thanks! I always assume they’re finding a way to directly enrich themselves further, because they often are.
I always decline, without exception.
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It’s not my duty to pull from my personal funds to support others. I ALWAYS vote to help others with my tax dollars.
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I don’t actually know where my money is going. I haven’t researched these organizations. I don’t know where my money ends up.
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I’ve been saying this for years.
If it could be verified that they at least matched donations, they might have better luck
They are, using your money so they can get the tax right off…
This feels like you consciously made errors just to irritate people. What’s with the random comma? And “tax right off”… seriously?
yes
I don’t think they ever disclose which charity the money goes to. That’s the real problem here. I don’t think it would be a bad thing at all to encourage small donations like that, I just have no trust my money is going somewhere I’d approve of.
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!
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.
If you’re so inclined, set up a monthly or annual donation directly to a cause you care about. Then you can ignore those prompts and have a chip on your shoulder about it, and you get the tax deduction instead of Profits Incorporated getting it.
