Amazon Smile shuts down

[mellowtigger]

Not many people knew of it, but anything you could buy at Amazon.com could also be bought at Smile.Amazon.com, with a portion of the sale money being donated to the charity you selected. At work, I always tried to direct products to that url when people asked me for tech items. Well, I just saw the email from Amazon that they are shutting down this charity service. Why it was a separate service instead of baked-in to the main corporate webpage, I don't know.

Media this morning report that people are surprised, like me.

The news has been met with a mix of disbelief, anger, and confusion from charities and consumers. For example, the SquirrelWoord Enquine Sanctuary tweeted a copy of the announcement along with the comment "What???? Seriously @amazon." One reply points out that AmazonSmile was a way to support small charities who are "innovative and creative," while another says they made purchases through Amazon because of the donation and that will not be the case in the future. https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-is-closing-down-amazonsmile-on-feb-20

The slow collapse continues, I guess. Exponential-growth capitalism must be fed at all costs. (Or such is the inevitability, we're sternly told. ("The beginning is near."))

Comments

[dewline]

Exponential-growth capitalism is one of the Problems...ugh.

[mellowtigger]

Yeah, I've been harping about that issue at least since the Occupy movement. Honestly, I have no idea what's propping up our system currently. I truly expected it to fail by now.

[darkoshi]

I got that email too and felt disappointed by it. The vague reason they listed doesn't make sense to me:
"In 2013, we launched AmazonSmile to make it easier for customers to support their favorite charities. 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."

My selected charity was Doctors Without Borders, and in the last quarterly update email, Amazon wrote:

So far, AmazonSmile has donated:
* *$4,907,690.96* to Doctors Without Borders*
* *Over $400 million* to US charities
* *Over $449 million* to charities worldwide>

Those amounts are from 10 years' worth of donations, and they certainly don't seem insignificant to me. Even small charities are probably grateful for any amounts they get. So it makes me think Amazon simply doesn't want to be spending that much on charity anymore.


https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/amazon-discontinues-amazonsmile-charity-donation-program-amid-cost-cuts.html
"The average donation to charities was less than $230, Amazon said."
"The move to shutter AmazonSmile comes as CEO Andy Jassy has embarked on a sweeping review of the company's expenses amid a worsening economic outlook and slowing growth in its retail division."

[mellowtigger]

My former employer also greatly benefited. I found the last email to me from AmazonSmile, and it said:
$7,286,267.57 to The Nature Conservancy

A Mastodon thread led me to this Reddit thread. These two top comments at this url make it clear that AmazonSmile was never intended to help charities. It was meant just to cheat Google out of search engine referrals. That's all. Capitalism never ceases to be petty enough. *sigh*
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/

[barak]

Well... you know Bezos and bozos gotta pay for their superyachts somehow.

[mllesatine]

That is so rotten.

[wispywillow]

I've been donating to the World Wildlife Federation through smile-amazon. I'm sad to hear they're shutting it down.

[mellowtigger]

I knew a coworker from Animal Humane Society who left to work for WWF. I was disappointed to hear of their ethical troubles a few years ago. I still look at their job listings occasionally, but it's always bureaucratic stuff, not day-to-day tech work.