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

[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/