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!
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.
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.
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?
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?
If it could be verified that they at least matched donations, they might have better luck
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.
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.
I’ve been saying this for years.
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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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 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.
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.
They take the media credit, and then they get the tax credit, too. Couldn’t agree more, we rent U-Hauls and they ask for donations too and I tell my customers exactly that, don’t donate to the so they can donate all the money and save paying some taxes.
