How many people actually understand what these corporations are doing when you walk up to the register and they ask if you’d like to donate to xyz?
This practice infuriates me as a customer.
It’s exploitative, it’s deceptive and it’s just absolutely deplorable disgusting behavior and I’ll explain why. If you work for someone who promotes donating through the company they are fucking you over.
When you donate to a charity, you get to write that off. So the more you as an individual donate, the less you pay in taxes. That’s fair. You worked for that money. It’s you coming out of pocket and getting a benefit in return.
What these companies are doing is deceiving people by asking for a donation on behalf of a charity which leads ppl to believe their money is going directly to that charity. They are not informing you accurately what’s really taking place. When you give them money, you are not donating to a charity, you are donating directly to that company. They are exploiting ppls ignorance and as such, their labor. Once you’ve donated your money to the company, they then donate it to the charity.
They then take the donations and pay way less in taxes. Essentially they are having you come out of pocket, so they can keep more of their profits by giving less of it to the government.
They’re essentially taking your money from you, and stealing your benefit of a tax write-off which should save you money. Not them. They then get to deceive the public further by projecting a giving contributory positive image of the company to the community. This is also deception. They haven’t given shit. You did. On top of all of that, they then get to act all bubbly like they’re doing you a favor by helping you give back and people walk away feeling good like they did the right thing. No! They’re duping you and it’s an evil practice that should either be illegal or heavily regulated forcing transparency. At minimum they should be required to ask you for consent to give up your right to a tax write-off.
I don’t know if I articulated this as well as I wanted. Hopefully the point came through.