No Smile from Amazon
As I like to say, I am a red-blooded American capitalist. My business perspective is probably more laissez-faire than regulation, which means I truly believe that businesses have the right to do whatever they want as long as it's legal, ethical, and moral. But recently I was disappointed with an announcement from one of the largest companies in the world.
You probably read the same. Amazon announced that it was sunsetting its philanthropic program, called AmazonSmile, which generated hundreds of millions of dollars for nonprofits around the United States. Basically, if you hadn't heard about it, when you purchased something on Amazon, particularly if you were a prime member, you have the option of actually doing the shopping on a slightly different platform called, AmazonSmile, which allowed you to purchase the same thing but a very small part of the purchase would go to a nonprofit that you identified. When I first heard of it, I was on the board of the Ronald McDonald House here in Omaha. I thought it was ingenious. It allowed people to be philanthropic while using technology to purchase everyday items. I used it quite frequently with most of our Amazon purchases.
But with the immediate closing of the program, while Amazon is making the promise that they will make a one-time gift of 25% of an annual nonprofit’s Smile purchases from the previous year, it did bring up some interesting questions. I heard one person ask if Amazon is going to be willing to share the names of those individuals who purchased items through this platform so they could solicit them directly. I think the answer is a pretty clear “no” on that one. Another question was about how their smaller nonprofit could reach so many people with such limited budgets. A good question but I'm not sure that Amazon cares. I'm sure there are other countless inquiries about this change.
Again, Amazon can do whatever it wants and I believe in that general principle. But this was a very ingenious simple way for people to feel they were being charitable with actual dollars going to nonprofits in very small amounts that might be more affordable than writing a onetime check. It was cheaper for nonprofits. And also gave Amazon a pretty good PR boost. But here's my real question. Nearly $50 million was going to nonprofits annually, with its expenses less than $250,000. Are they now going to give $50 million to nonprofits out of their sales to offset that loss of opportunity or will the money just become more “profit?” There's no requirement they have to, but it sure would be interesting to hear them try to answer that particular inquiry.
