The store takes your donation, then they donate it and take all the credit.
“Store name” donated $1 million to XYZ Charity.
Don't we all hate this
Submitted 16 hours ago by Mickey7@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/fbbc1e96-36a4-4e65-9cfc-3295c330eb84.png
Comments
Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Eczpurt@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Not only do they get the credit, they also get tax benefits from the donation.
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 16 hours ago
I don’t think they can get a tax break, but they definitely get the media attention.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 14 hours ago
This old myth still… They do not get any tax benefits. That’s not how taxes work. The donation is your donation. You can claim it on your own taxes if you itemize deductions.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
They make a dollar, they donate a dollar. No change to tax.
M137@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
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.
Nomorereddit@lemmy.today 1 hour ago
I want potatoe coupons!
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
And they get credit for donating even tho it was actually their customers.
nathanjent@programming.dev 2 hours ago
In many cases they also cause the child hunger by paying their employees a wage so low that food assistance is required.
motruck@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
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.
Quexotic@infosec.pub 3 hours ago
If only in the form of a tax break. You’re literally donating to the company asking for the cash.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
Infuriates me as well. I don’t think they realize how it looks and sounds in 2026.
Fedizen@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
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”
We should ban for profit corporations from doing certain things, this is one of them. We know you’re using the money as a tax writeoff. Ban this shit. Not everything is drugs.
Beero@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
They are, using your money so they can get the tax right off…
M137@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
This feels like you consciously made errors just to irritate people. What’s with the random comma? And “tax right off”… seriously?
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
um that’s illegal. I mean your spelling of “write off”, but also that charity deduction thing, that’s not true.
W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
Blo0dixte4rz@hilariouschaos.com 18 minutes ago
That is wrong on so many levels, but it is so true. What if our brains actually think this?
minorkeys@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
As far as the world knows, they did. It was the $20 you gave them.
TrollTrollrolllol@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
and you didn’t give them $20 so they had to let the orphans starve, nothing they could do.
FrostyTheDoo@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
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?
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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.
FrostyTheDoo@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
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.
Blo0dixte4rz@hilariouschaos.com 19 minutes ago
I used to watch this happen all the time in South Carolina where I used to live… But I also used to do it myself, I’d be like, well hell if we’re gonna sit out here and panhandle, we might as well do it in a group! You knew one thing - that caused a need for - the other thing and then - that other thing would belong to the next thing. It’s a good base strategy.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 11 hours ago
Donations through a non profit, where the CEO and/or some of their family are on the board and paid a big salary from those donations, so only a fraction makes it to the stated goal.
daggermoon@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I’ve been saying this for years.
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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.
MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 4 hours ago
So what you’re saying is you’d rather have your money taken from you by force, as long as it’s lawful and you get to pretend you have a say in how it’s used…
qaeta@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
I think what they are saying is that they’d rather the burden be distributed equitably across the populace instead of placing the burden entirely on good people.
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Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
If it could be verified that they at least matched donations, they might have better luck
tangonov@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
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?
iamthetot@piefed.ca 14 hours ago
I donate a fair bit of money relative to my income bracket. Sometimes it’s directly to places that need it. Sometimes it’s by donating goods instead of money. Sometimes it’s by entering raffles at work, or buying candy from kids at the store, or a coupon book from veterans.
And sometimes it’s by donating at the till. Look, corpos suck. But one of the only good things they do is solicit donations at the till.
Stores process thousands and thousands of transactions a day, and if even only a handful of those people decide to round up or add a little bit more on top, it adds up to so much money for good causes that I guarantee would not otherwise ever get donated.
And please, please can we put this myth to rest: in no country that I am aware of can a company claim your donations on their taxes. Those donations are yours and yes, you can claim them on your taxes if you are willing to do the work of keeping the receipt and itemizing your deductions. I do this every single year.
black_flag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
They don’t claim it on their taxes, they claim it in marketing
iamthetot@piefed.ca 13 hours ago
Correct, and I did not repudiate that. It is a bargain that I think is worth striking.
moonshadow@slrpnk.net 11 hours ago
I had a dream where pretty much the same prompt came up but it was offering me a discount for being poor
miniinstance@lemmy.today 4 hours ago
That money is going to pedophiles who will in return feed the children
SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip 14 hours ago
Oh, for Pete’s sake! If you don’t want to donate, don’t donate, but at least get the facts, please. There’s plenty of stuff in the world to get angry about right now that’s real. In reality:
- The store has to book your donation as “unearned revenue,” that is, money it collected, but is not theirs. Charitable donations collected through the registers do not count as the store’s income. Giving the lump sum to the charity does not count as a store expense. The store is merely a custodian of the money until transferring it to the charity.
- YOU get the tax deduction, not the store. If you itemize your tax deductions (and do not take the standard deduction), you can submit the register receipt as proof of a donation, and get the tax benefit.
- The media coverage of these donations for PR benefit is basically nil. Off the top of your head, name the last 3 feel-good stories about grocery store charity donations that you saw in the news. (Can you name even one? I can’t.)
- Stores often do add some of their own money to the donation, but charitable donations are an “above the line” adjustment to income, not a “below the line” refundable credit. That is, the value of the write-off is the amount of tax the store avoided, which is always less then the amount of money it gave.
Last time I was at a grocery, and the payment terminal asked my to round up, I did. I see it as a win-win-win. I win because I can feel good about donating, even if it was only 14 cents. The store wins by some of my good feelings transferring to it; as well, the people who run the store are human, and also want to feel good about themselves by helping a charity. The charity itself wins by getting a couple thousand dollars that it wouldn’t have received otherwise. Despite my best intentions, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to donate to that organization, and absolutely would not have bothered to give a tiny amount like 14 cents. But every little bit helps, and a few cents each from hundreds people adds up. I see this as a frictionless way to do some good.
Source: Used to work at a family-owned grocery store.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
You think people working at a multibillion dollar grocery chain give a crap about your 14¢ round-up? It’s implied this is not some “family owned” small store.
Do you think anyone keeps grocery receipts at tax time to claim the $5 write off over the year with 30 receipt’s worth of round-ups?
The meme is essentially true. A big corp is asking a nobody who is probably trying to save some cash to give a billion dollar operation money so the Big Corp gets the brownie points for the donation. They don’t give a shit about you other than “Big Grocer & ‘customers’” donate $$$.
The only two points you made that I agree with are “just say no” if you don’t want to, and donate if you like the good feels. Just make sure Big Grocery is donating to a charity that is decent and doesn’t soak up most of the $ in admin costs.
SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip 13 hours ago
The meme is fine, it’s the comments. If a business is following the law, the business must pass along the full amount of donated money, and does not get a tax deduction. I tried to look up some numbers, and found that many companies do not even report the amounts they collect, so they’re not doing it for media coverage. Agree with me or not, those are the facts.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
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.
Mrkawfee@feddit.uk 9 hours ago
yes
tomatosametomato@piefed.zip 15 hours ago
Any time you say no to some donation request, know that saying no is the normal (statistical) thing to do. Otherwise, the donation request wouldn’t exist: People democratically said no to this (either directly or representatives) at the tax level so we need external money gathering tools.
Upperhand@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
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.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 14 hours ago
They do not get tax credits for this. That’s not how taxes work (if they claimed the donations as profit, then donated them, it would be a net zero gain).
The donations are yours. You can claim them on your own taxes.
ceenote@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
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.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 9 hours ago
You still get the tax deduction if you donate at the till, fyi. The store does not (nor would it make any sense to, anyway - if they claim it as profit, then claim it as donation, the net is zero).
wolfrasin@lemmy.today 15 hours ago
I didn’t shop here to lower the corporation’s tax liability, thanks! Corporate can donate their own salary.
Piss on cash register donation begging corporations
iamthetot@piefed.ca 14 hours ago
Companies collecting donations on your behalf cannot use them as tax deductions. Those are your tax deductible donations and if you do desired, you could keep your receipt and claim them on your taxes.
wolfrasin@lemmy.today 7 hours ago
Oh cool! Thanks for the info
BigDiction@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
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!
titanicx@lemmy.zip 56 minutes ago
Not only that, but most corporations like these match the donations, so you are donating 1$, they are donating 60k$.