My grandparents ALWAYS CALLED THIS A SCAM

The store takes your donation, then they donate it and take all the credit.

“Store name” donated $1 million to XYZ Charity.

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

I never see the results of all the asking either, the large cheques that you see posted in the front of these stores never seem to amount to the millions of dollars you would think. In the end they will claim the value of the money given as tax break for the business and you get poorer. Funny that.

They want you to give them a tax break. It's a scam like all capitalism is.

And they get credit for donating even tho it was actually their customers.

I always decline, without exception.

1. It's not my duty to pull from my personal funds to support others. I ALWAYS vote to help others with my tax dollars.

2. 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.

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.

I hate the self checkouts. I scan everything, put it in my bag, want to pay, but then there's a check. So I have to unpack everything, wait for someone to scan everything, then pack everything again. From the 40 self checkout counters there's only 1 for cash money, while I have a lot of cash from selling stuff second hand so need to get rid of it. There's always a line. Oh how I feel shitty AF when I have to unpack and pack everything with 9 people breathing down my neck. And if I made a mistake, they treat me like a criminal. I'm not being paid to do their job! For fuck sake. And even though I don't give a shit about this super rich mega company who extort their personnel, I'm too honest of a guy to steal anything (even though they deserve being stolen from). I'm autistic. I just simply can't. But when I made a mistake, being treated like a criminal while being an honest person makes the whole experience so much worse.

So I resort to ordering groceries online, buy in bulk so I only have to deal with a delivery person once in a while. But next to being autistic, I also have ADHD which causes me to always forget at least one thing from every meal I plan to make, forcing me to go to the store anyway.

Just let me put everything on the conveyor belt, say hi, pay, say thanks bye, grab my shit and go. And repeat this step 3 times until I have everything I forgot.

As far as the world knows, they did. It was the $20 you gave them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

If it could be verified that they at least matched donations, they might have better luck