There were seemingly odd hoops for customers to jump through to have their purchases qualify for Smile. Didn't type in the 'smile' URL? Too bad, no donation for you. One of the oddest was requiring push notifications in order for mobile purchases to count (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233815).
They wanted you to turn on push on mobile so they could pollute your Lock Screen with ads. I did it and promptly set iOS to deliver them silently because it got really annoying, but it was an easy way for the EFF to get some money from purchases I was making anyway.
It was also in this weird spot where they wanted to use it for PR but simultaneously wanted to shove it beneath the floorboards so people won’t mass adopt it.
On android they did the asshole thing and detected if the notifications were disabled and turned off smile. No ios hiding the true notification state there.
I would often forget to type "smile" when searching for stuff, but then I'd just add to cart, close the window, and go to my cart via smile. That seemed to work.
But I think we can all see this for what it is — belt tightening. Will they increase other philanthropic activities to the tune of what they were previously giving away via Smile? I would be very, very surprised if so.
They actually might. Whatever the overhead was in managing and tracking payments to that many charities based on payments from that many customers had to be significant. Instead, they could just throw 50 mil across the top 10 each year and not have to deal with managing the smile program anymore.
I imagine there could be ways to make their philanthropic donations more efficient. What I'm saying is I doubt they are actually going to donate this amount, and achieve greater impact (however that is measured). I imagine they are going to launch programs that they were already going to launch, donating to whatever charities they favor for other reasons. For example, if they're building a new office somewhere, they can give a bunch of money to charities in that community, to build goodwill in the community.
But these donations are not done purely for altruistic reasons — they're calculated decisions that also help the corporate entity. There's nothing wrong with this, and they'd still be doing good. But it's not the same as letting your customers decide where to donate hundreds of millions of dollars.
Amazon in my country has an image problem. Sure people use it, but people hate it for "killing the high street" and other such nonsense.
Facebook adverts picking random local charities and showing how much they've raised is far better, run them on amazon's front page too.
The local hospice I choose has raised £3k via amazon smile. That's far better PR than them giving £1m novelty cheques to some remote city based charity.
Of course it had an impact. It's guaranteed to just be something that's not seen as 'sexy' internally, and therefore has probably had no-one championing it, and it gathered dust and finally... someone just wanted to kill the code.
I've seen it happen first hand in similar sized companies.
I'm quite convinced the motivations for both the creation and teardown of this donation program must have come from the money people, not from the techies. It must have been a tax write-off. Nothing else makes sense, knowing how strongly Amazon is a cost-cutting company.
I always assumed having to type the smile domain was more about making sure they didn't have to make both an affiliate payment and a smile payment on the same order.
Seemed like an easy way to cut off affiliates while appearing to be generous. Maybe I'm just too cynical.
Oh but they weren't forcing the customers to go to smile and strip the affiliate attribution for their session. Why, they don't even provide a link for the customer to click! The customer is choosing to actively navigate to smile themselves (when prompted by t he reminder at the top of the amazon page). So obviously that means Amazon can't be accused of doing anything nefarious to screw their affiliates (or, more seriously and litigiously, their advertising partners) out of their due credit for the sale. The customer simply chose to switch to smile. And it's all for charity so who could possibly complain?
www.amazon.com sets cookies for (*).amazon.com, though. Session cookies (and affiliate info) could therefore still be accessed on smile.amazon.com. I think affiliate attribution is just discarded regardless of cookie presence.
That’s because smile was invented as a way to bypass having to pay Google for the referral link; incentivize people to retype the link before actually buying it was the ultimate goal.
Well, that's unfortunate. I've been using Chrome redirector extension and all my Amazon orders were automatically smile-eligible, with Signal Foundation receiving all of it. This was probably the easiest, most hassle-free and cheapest (as in - free) way to support organizations.
Amazon actively made choices to prevent purchases from contributing towards Smile donations. You had to type the URL and make the purchase from smile.amazon.com. When they say that the program has not grown to create the impact that they had originally hoped, it is a complete fabrication. It did not grow because they made choices to prevent it.
That's the average, sure, but since Amazon allows each customer to pick a charity, I imagine some charities got a lot more, and some a lot less.
According to my account page, I've generated $100.71 for the charity I selected, and, overall, they've received $273.64 as a part of the program. So I guess the charity I selected wasn't all that popular. But I expect other, more mainstream charities, were.
It would be politically inconvenient for the FSF to accept that they get donations in kind from Amazon or Microsoft, given the FSF's regular attacks on the two companies.
I can't decide which is funnier, the fact that you think a fifteen-year-old experience is relevant now, or the fact they had to update the story multiple times because the author kept getting facts wrong. Not exactly a slam dunk on backing up the "most non-profits are a scam" claim.
Huh? The article is less than three years old; nothing but the first and last few paragraphs focus on the author's 15-year-old experience; and the couple of corrections at the end were fairly trivial, especially for such a long article.
The SPLC is one of the non-profits that is most responsible for this general assumption. The only one that might be more of a household name as a bad non-profit is Komen.
Assuming equal distribution is disingenuous. FreeBSD as an example has received nearly twenty thousand dollars through this program. It made a difference.
Checking my account right now: I generated $2.86, and my charity received $399.79. Yay for being average I guess!
I’m surprised they couldn’t squeeze more out of this program though. With credit cards, I think the points system definitely works to make you feel better about your purchase.
You think "I'm spending $500 for this dohicky, but I'm getting some magical points too". Intellectually you know those points are worth about $5, but there's an element of "mystery box" too. Maybe those points will be worth $50, or even more.
Like airline miles. You can convince yourself that X number of miles is "worth" $10k because they let you fly business class to Asia. In reality you don't value that flight at $10k because you wouldn't pay $10k to fly business class if you didn't have the points.
IMO they tried to strike a balance, the existence of Smile helps drive traffic to Amazon and improve their PR, but they make it harder than it should be (you have to use a speciic link, you have to enable push notifications on mobile etc.) so they don't end up having to pay too much. Logically they could have made Smile an option you set once and it's applied forever, but they didn't.
Absolute peak corpo-speak. I think I can translate:
> We don't want to send smaller amounts of money to a huge amount of charities chosen by users, since some users likely chose charities that we do not support. It also doesn't allow us to print out those huge oversized checks for photo ops. We will continue to give a bare pittance out to a small number of organizations selected for peak public relations points while minimizing cost and maximizing tax write-offs and greasing the right palms to advance our business.
I asked ChatGPT to translate your paragraph back to positive sounding corporate speak:
> We are committed to being strategic and efficient with our charitable giving by focusing on a select number of organizations that align with our values and support our business objectives. This approach allows us to make a meaningful impact and gain positive visibility through high-impact initiatives and partnerships. Additionally, it maximizes the benefits of our charitable investments, including cost savings and tax advantages.
Yeah. If they had hoped for more impact, they could have, say, made Smile the default, instead of only very occasionally reminding you to use their inexplicably different URL for smile purchases.
The entire point of the url restriction was to save money on google search ads and boost costumers starting their search from Amazon first. The search ads savings was what went to charities.
Smile and affiliate commissions are separate. So in your example both the charity and the stale affiliate link would receive a cut that is independent of the other. Source: I run an affiliate site and my links always direct to Smile, and I keep getting commissions.
Is it possible that by linking to smile, your amount is reduced by the smile amount, or that it operates differently when the affiliate link happens first and the smile insertion happens second?
I've been donating to charities through affiliate links and Smile for a while. Whenever I plan to make a purchase I go to the smile.amazon.com URL while also appending a charity's affiliate link (e.g. "/?tag=AFFILIATE-ID") to the URL.
I think charities will still get a significant amount from my purchases, since AmazonSmile was only 0.5%, while affiliate links for many categories are 4% or higher.
I particularly like that the email I got addresses me (despite the many tens of thousands of dollars I've spent through Amazon over the past two decades) as lower-case "customer." My default position on the various AWS keynotes about the power of data / personalization is "you first, buddy."
The fun part of Amazon Smile was that it let customers decide how they wanted to change the world…but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much.
This is surprisingly honest for corporatespeak and I think reflects the god-complex which tends to follow people who spend a lot of time taking in billions of dollars.
The reality is there were a lot of charities - maybe even most of them - who were getting donations which were completely incongruent with Amazon’s moral sensibilities.
There’s no law saying they have to let customers pick, and this isn’t worth “outrage”, but I think it’s behavior which signals a lot about the way Amazon’s top leadership has shifted.
This is not a bad question, but part of the value of Smile was that it was very easy to support a selected charity as a side effect of another activity.
I think this will hurt smaller charities. They might not have been getting a huge donation from Smile, but I also think a lot of Smile users aren't going to consciously donate to the charity they selected - certainly not in the $5-$10 range that is probably more than most individual shoppers accounted for each term - and as a result those charities will be taking in less than before.
Smile was a good program. I have no idea what it cost Amazon to operate, but I am pretty confident it resulted in more money going to charity than whatever Amazon will now do instead.
Honest? Why should we believe all of the Amazon smile purchases will continue and contribute to charity? If the program is getting scrapped, are we to believe Amazon is going to send 0.5% of everyone’s purchases to charity?
This is an attempt to recover revenue, nothing more.
Sorry, I don’t really understand what you’re talking about.
My point is they are trying to sugarcoat this as focusing on specific charities, whereas I believe total donation dollars is going to drop. In addition, I think Amazon is hoping to save on costs having to manage AmazonSmile itself.
I suspect that saving the cost of managing AmazonSmile is the primary motivator. That's a lot of overhead! Two thousand pages of charities, most of which are collecting less than $30. I'd bet there are hundreds, if not thousands, of charities that Amazon was paying more to manage collection/disbursement than the actual charity received. (Or maybe not--there seems to be a minimum payout of $5.00, starting on page 1881.)
They're a public company so it'll be on their 10-K in some form. And of course the charities would notice if they didn't, though they're only going to mention good news.
> …but now they’ve decided they - Amazon - know better, thank you very much.
Or, a less cynical take is that they really can have more impact by focusing on fewer charities. Another commenter posted Amazon Smile's Form 990 from 2018 [1], the most recent year on Pro Publica's website that has a full listing of all the charities that received funds.
The total PDF is 2121 pages long, and the list of charities starts on page 18. They made about $37.5 million in total donations that year. The top charity, the ASPCA, received $1.8 million that year (note that the ASPCA had total revenue of $267.7 million that year). But the main point is that the charity on the top of the second page, which is only about 100 charities from the top (ordered by total amount received) received just over $10,000, and the charity at the top of the third page received $5659. And there are still over 2100 pages of charities to go!
So it seems imminently reasonable to me that, rather than give a couple hundred bucks a year to thousands and thousands and thousands of charities, to instead consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good.
But smaller organizations will be missed entirely. My charity is a cat shelter in St. Louis. I’d rather they get my cut than a larger charity that means less to me and has bigger fundraising machinery.
This is exactly right. I help run a small local non-profit makerspace, and donations through Smile help keep the space open and free, without a membership fee.
Indeed. But these things tend to follow a log tale for benefit-to-charity and constant to increasing marginal costs. If it costs Amazon $2 in SMILE proceeds to donate $0.02 for a quarter, then it makes sense, if only for that particular charity, to not process it. This is independent of whether Amazon directly foots the bill or indirectly foots the bill via commitments and outlay portions of the SMILE allocations.
Yes and small charities like this are generally volunteer-run and a very high percentage of their income goes to their charitiable purpose.
Large charities leech off the existence of the problems they are claiming to solve. If they actually solved them, they wouldn't be needed any more. Name any large organization that has ever worked itself out of needing to exist. And their executives make a lot of money.
California allocated 7 billion in 2022 to homelessness. There are 172,000 homeless in California. So that is $40,000 per homeless person, per year, in just state funds. Lot's of people keep a roof over their heads while making less money than that a year. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dude. There were 172,000 homeless people counted in one night.
Among those people, some were chronically homeless, which basically means mentally ill, disabled and/or addicted to something. Nobody is paying for housing and health care for these people for less than $40k per year.
The majority of those people, however, are not in that group. They also didn’t stay homeless all year - over the course of one year, many times that number were nearly homeless and got help from those funds to avoid it (pay back rent to avoid eviction, pay a deposit on a new place, etc), or used these funds for services while homeless - shelter, job training, medical care, assistance applying for disability payments, etc. Besides directly funding these services, the money was also spent in paying people to manage job training programs, run the shelters, be social workers who know how disability applications work, be social workers who have to find their homeless clients to tell them about work opportunities, track available spaces in rehab programs, ……………
Your attempted equivalency there is missing so much information that it is uselessly wrong.
I’m sure that the frontline workers for those organizations are earnest and genuine in their effort to help, but it’s also undoubtedly true that there’s a lot of money to be made (and it’s not really in the interest of those making the money to see the problem solved). If you search the term “homeless industrial complex”, you’ll see lots of hot takes on this. I’m not really endorsing any specific perspective, but I suspect that, as always, the truth is mixed and complex.
I said the truth is mixed and complex, not that it is "in the middle". The last few years provide examples of that which are as good as any other time.
"there's money to be made" is one of the weakest arguments there is. Capitalism makes it all about money! There's little doing without it.
This opinion can lead to some really ignorant statements (which I've heard before) :
- Full time jobs at charities? Money laundering for sure, they should reject their salary and starve.
- Investing in clean energy? A conspiracy, some people make money there.
- Recycling? People are paid to do it, it's a sham.
- Politician not forfeiting his salary? Corruption, they shouldn't make a living (or just take brides under the table).
"There's money to be made" isn't an argument. The world is not a binary, just because I am implying that some part of an industry is cronyism and grift, doesn't mean that I am asserting that it is 100% the case. It would be equally dumb to assert that it is 0%.
> Name any large organization that has ever worked itself out of needing to exist.
This is an interesting take, but got me wondering, what organization _period_ has ever worked itself out of needing to exist? I'd love to hear examples.
I'd encourage you to ask the shelter how much they get from Amazon Smile. My guess is it's $200-300 max, which is barely enough to save a single cat.
Worse, there is a well-known phenomenon [1] where if people's "guilt" is taken away, then they are less likely to donate overall. That is, for at least some portion of people, they probably mark a small charity as their Amazon Smile recipient and then think "Great, I'm donating to charity!", not realizing their donations are like 50 cents. But if they didn't sign up for Amazon Smile they might be more likely to actually donate a real amount.
To be clear, I'm all for small charities getting money, but I'd almost rather it be like a lottery or something so a smaller number of small charities could get money they could actually do something with.
not sure how that follows... the impacts of donating has diminishing returns. I'd much rather see a diverse of array of causes supported. I doubt any of these charities rely on Amazon Smile as a primary source of donations but a lot of smaller charities would benefit
Funny sidenote is that my chosen charity was actually ProPublica
Amazon has been historically very stingy with their donations.
Internally, employees have begged for literally decades for an employee donation matching program (similar to Microsoft's donation matching) and have been stonewalled for years, with upper leadership not wanting to give a firm answer as to why.
Meanwhile, most of the philanthropic endeavors that Amazon does offer its employees internally are in some way otherwise related to things that Jeff has a fiduciary tie to or where doing so was politically motivated to turn a blind eye to the rapid expansion of the Downtown/SLU Seattle Campus.
Other large companies are similar. I worked for one multinational where they only allowed employee donation matching in narrow cases:
- certain large universities
- certain large hospitals
And that's it. I wrote to HR multiple times asking if my local health related charity could be part of their matching donations. Finally got a terse answer saying "no, only the ones on the list."
Some enterprises are so scared of anything remotely resembling controversy that they severely restrict matching, and others just don't offer it at all.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is fantastic about employee matching.
And the smile program was another example of that. Had to use the correct url or nothing went to charity. They could have made it a setting for the user, or an option during checkout.
I bet if the offered round up for charity in the checkout process the funds collected would dwarf those raised by the smile program.
If your “less cynical” (I’d say “more naive” :P) take is true, then where’s their concurrent announcement that they’re donating .5% of sales (or at least .5* * % of revenue that was amazon-smiled since not everyone used it) to a smaller set of organizations?
Riffing on this: if you thought about charity in the "maximize social utility function" way that SV types tend to talk, wouldn't you suspect that Amazon Smile would also be an actually a good way of allocating charitable dollars? Or at least better than a megacorp picking and choosing? Markets work, wisdom of the crowds, and so on.
There's something very "early 21st century social trust crisis" about keeping the "capitalist utlitarianism" logos of neoliberalism while throwing out the "democratized decision making" ethos of neoliberalism.
Totally this. Our company had a diversity hiring initiative and I wanted to do some outreach in our area so I reached out about sponsoring an LGBTQ+ event. As a primary sponsor on the bill, my anticipation was that our goodwill gesture would go a good distance in the community and we should leave it at that, but HQ wanted a signup sheet with us trying to get people’s info for recruiting and numbers to publish for the HR team to show their money wasn’t just “thrown to the wind.” I got very cynical about doing events like that after that. It’s not really giving if you expect something in return.
Like, I get it, it’s not just a slush fund, but maybe it sort of should be. Does every dollar spent have to have clear ROI? Where’s the charity?
I volunteer for a charity where each and every $500 donation supports a kid going through a program. That program regularly changes kids' life trajectories in a way that has a difficult to quantify multiplier effect throughout the community.
I am highly skeptical of wisdom of utilitarianism in charitable giving. No one has non-toy models so the math is all made up nonsense. More importantly, proximity between the giver and the recipient has profound agency effects that are completely ignored by most utilitarians. You tend to get better outcomes when you allow agents to center their personal projects, even if resources aren't optimally allocated when ignoring this "agent centering effect".
This. I am not a demographic utilitarians usually target. Despite that my family received support from government and charitable programs when I was a child. Without them I doubt I would have been able perform in school and ultimately get the job that I have today. Now I make enough money that I donate to charities.
> consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good.
It also gives Amazon much more control over the charity. If you give $1000 to a charity, they are happy and do their thing. If you give a charity $1,000,000 your priorities are going to become their priorities.
> So it seems imminently reasonable to me that, rather than give a couple hundred bucks a year to thousands and thousands and thousands of charities, to instead consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good.
Specifically, where it can most efficiently buy image and influence for Amazon. For profit corporations charitable donations, like any other expenditures of corporate funds, are made to advance the commercial interests of the corporation.
Or, a more cynical take is that I only seemed to get reminders to go to smile.amazon.com if I had arrived via an affiliate link. I always suspected that it was a money-saving strategy, that if I clicked the reminder and arrived at smile.amazon.com, that maybe they wouldn't have to pay the affiliate commission. But I never looked into it at all, so that was just my pure speculation.
The whole point of affiliate links is that they're generating sales that wouldn't have existed without- it is essentially an incentive for people to advertise for Amazon in organic ways. Whether the money goes to the affiliate or the smile program at that point wouldn't really make much difference, and actively undermining the people who post affiliate links seems like it would be a stereotypically idiotic corporate split brain thing to do.
I don't often click on affiliate links, but I also don't recall seeing the smile reminder when I have used them. YMMV I guess.
>Or, a less cynical take is that they really can have more impact by focusing on fewer charities.
It's hard not to be cynical when you look at the charities they are focusing on. All of them are in-house, and seem positioned to strongly benefit Amazon. Like the one where they brag about building houses near the Amazon major headquarters.
No I had my own preferred charity which was part of the smile program. It just seems a bad customer experience taking away a feature that myself and others cherished in Amazon prime. Another wrong decision.
> which is only about 100 charities from the top (ordered by total amount received) received just over $10,000, and the charity at the top of the third page received $5659.
Honestly, this seems rather impressive. A lot higher than I thought! That's great! The reason I expected lower is because these tend to follow power laws with a very steep decline. The 200th charity makes more than half what the 100th charity makes is pretty good. I had to go through 19 pages of charities (I counted 126 lines on one page, but I probably miscounted so +/- some) before I started to see them go below $1k. That's quite impressive though, there's over 2k charities getting over $1k
Who is the “they” in “They would have bigger impact”, by what criteria, and why does this “they” have any relevance to the effectiveness whatsoever?
Seriously. Amazon is literally just writing a check, or just as likely, putting store credit in an account.
Where do they figure in to donating at all beyond a middle man?
Seriously, how does Amazon differ than GoFundMe in this context? And as a follow up, if this is such a good move for “effectiveness” why shouldn’t GoFundMe do they same thing?
Reading through the list, I see planned parenthood listed many many times. Planned parenthood of Arizona, planned parenthood of Wisconsin, etc. I imagine if you added them all up, planned parenthood was getting a tidy sum of donations from Amazon smile.
I had already canceled my Prime membership and started shopping elsewhere. I'm not exactly outraged by this news - although I did always buy through Smile - but I'm now doubly sure Amazon won't be my first choice going forward.
I think a lot of folks can get by without a Prime membership. My prime subscription ended almost a year ago now and I don't miss it. Amazon shipping has got progressively slower as time went on. Prime video is terrible UX with subpar content. At $15 a month it just isnt worth it.
I've now opted for the "free" shipping that you get when you spend $25+. Items that I cannot wait for I will buy local, which usually now offer same day delivery.
Cancelling my Prime membership a few years ago made it immediately clear that all I was paying for was to not have my package sit in the warehouse for an extra 3-4 days before making it to my house in two days anyway. I also started getting shipments coming from warehouses on the other side of the country, something that never happened while I was paying for Prime. Immediately clear that the benefits for ordering were entirely artificial.
> I also started getting shipments coming from warehouses on the other side of the country, something that never happened while I was paying for Prime.
That doesn't sound entirely artificial to me, though? It seems more likely that they're reserving stock in closer (and likely, more expensive) warehouses for people who are paying for two day shipping, either by having a Prime membership or by paying for the shipping.
> Amazon shipping has got progressively slower as time went on.
While there are definitely periods where I would have agreed with you, recently Amazon has seriously increased the % of products which are deliverable same day.
It's also not just for common items. I can buy a thermocouple amplifier board and have it delivered today. It really scratches an itch when you can get components for a project delivered THAT DAY. I could be playing with thermocouples TODAY. Hard to resist.
"The fun part of Amazon Smile was that it let customers decide how they wanted to change the world"
The corporate justification part of amazon smile was in the same effort as any charity in purchase which is to make the consumer feel empowered, righteous and moral for the decision to consume a product. Charity tie ins like rainforest donations or carbon offsets are designed to incense consumers to evangelize. They're designed to eliminate buyers remorse returns and blunt the often ever present reality of sweat shop labor. That anyone got real money from this is just a happy side effect.
This reminds me of a cartoon that shows a field of sheep and a billboard with a wolf captioned "I will eat you", and one of the sheep says admiringly, "He really tells it like it is."
We need less, not more, of this. Ending this program is absolutely wrong, and the wrong is not lessened because they are being honest about their greed.
I'm sad, but unsurprised to see Amazon Smile go. Retail isn't exactly high margin to begin with, and Amazon has made a specialty of squeezing what margin remained. As Jeff Bezos said, "Your margin is my opportunity." So, when Amazon announced Smile, I was very surprised that they weren't adding a surcharge for the donation, but rather where making the donation out of whatever margin they earned on the product.
I guess with the current economic downturn, Amazon has decided that there is insufficient margin to continue taking a cut out and donating it to charity.
From what I've read, an Amazon smile link will superceded any affiliate link you clicked on. That means Amazon goes from paying out multiple percent to 0.5%.
I'm guessing the administrative burden of so many organizations is a big driver behind the shutdown.
Oof, really? Then I actually feel bad that some of the smaller blogs I follow that published legit reviews didn't get credit for my sales. (I use the Always Smile browser extension.)
I don't think this is true, I run an affiliate site that directs people to Smile, and my commissions have been the same whether I direct to Smile or not. I have heard that your conversions typically go down when you use Smile. However I think that might be because many customers have never signed up for Smile and are scared away. I decided to stick with Smile links because I thought that in the long term it would motivate people to continue using my site and I figured at worst I'd help charities a lot more than the income I'd lose so I'm a bit sad to learn about this.
Some retail isn't high margin, that's absolutely true.
Some retail has a 75%+ markup as standard at the store. That's why they're able to regularly offer sales where they take 25%, 50%, even 75% off: it's not just to clear out unsold inventory; many retailers that do this are still making a profit at those prices.
Amazon, being a "sell everything and more" retailer, certainly doesn't get to enjoy those high profit margins for all their products, but they also definitely do not have to deal with the razor-thin margins of other sectors across the board. They get to average it out nicely somewhere in the middle.
Some retail has a 75%+ markup as standard at the store. That's why
they're able to regularly offer sales where they take 25%, 50%,
even 75% off: it's not just to clear out unsold inventory; many
retailers that do this are still making a profit at those prices.
But how many of those items actually sell at the sticker price? The reason I ask is because I've noticed this with mechanical watches (which I have a moderate interest in). Mechanical watches will often have absurd sticker prices. Two, or even three times the final sale price is quite common. But do any of those watches actually sell at those prices? Does anyone actually spend a thousand dollars for, e.g. a Hamilton automatic which has a selling price of roughly $400 on Amazon, and elsewhere? I very much doubt it. The sticker price is just there to add prestige and the sale price, for all intents and purposes, is the actual price.
Similarly, clothing often has some ridiculous sticker price, because the entire point of the sticker price is to be marked down in one of the seemingly perpetual sales that retailers have. I remember that J.C. Penney, when they hired Apple head of retail Ron Johnson, tried to change this practice, by setting the list price of clothing closer to the price that they paid, eschewing having sales. It was a disaster [1]. Customers had become accustomed to seeing large markdowns, and when those markdowns weren't there, they waited (or shopped at other retailers which continued to offer markdowns).
Just because the sticker price has a 75% (or 2-300%, in the case of watches) markup doesn't mean the retailer actually expects to make that margin on anything except a small fraction of sales.
Amazon treats their engineers so poorly that they have to set up training pipelines directly into middle schools. Maybe they think they can make them drink the kool-aid before they grow their critical thinking skills.
One of my favorite things about AmazonSmile is that I got the pick the charities based on what I considered important. Many times charity giving by companies can have different motivations (an example is Microsoft "donating" Windows and Office to schools so that that is what kids grow up more comfortable with).
By being able to choose who go the donations, it felt empowering and less likely the company was using charity to pursue secondary interests.
I suppose, it does bring me joy that a local no-kill shelter got $42,631.17 and I was able to get about $30 into that, its not ground breaking, but that's kind of the point of smile right. I guess I can donate out of my own pocket to the same shelter moving forward.
I wonder if some of these places were just really really good about advertising and asking their customers/community to give them a nod in their Prime accounts.
I'm not sure, but one of their locations did suffer from a fire within the past year, and they got enough donations to rebuild within a few short days, around that time I changed my Amazon Smile donation, I assume others thought the same thing I thought around that time window. It will be a shame that Amazon will take away donations from so many good places. I know I can donate myself directly, but it was far more meaningful that Amazon was doing so as you ordered things.
One of the primary strategies activists have managed to successfully deploy against those groups is through targeting advertisers. Also most tech workers are college educated which is a demographic that (increasingly) supports gun control/does not like the NRA
the point is there's not really a way for us to tell which is the "substance". It's all just correlations and it's all just a matter of what aspect you choose to highlight
You don’t think you can isolate variables and analyze effects? For example, you can’t study the opinions of people with high education who live in rural areas?
Now do it for all the other confounding variables. This is why social science is hard and requires a lot of statistical analysis.
I'm not making any claims one way or another. All I'm saying is knee-jerk assumptions based on a simplified mental model probably isn't a good idea unless you have the data to back it up. (Especially true on complex systems like human value systems).
A lot of people really, really hate guns, and some of those charities really, really love guns. (and one has the reputation among ~half the US population of really, really loving guns, and a reputation in the other half as "Negotiating Rights Away")
The people who really, really hate guns are more likely to work for tech companies than their counterparts, at least in my experience.
Also, Amazon in particular has long banned the sale of a large variety of gun components on their platform - even those that aren't regulated in any state. (bolts, barrels, handguards, stocks... oddly enough they do allow optics)
> The people who really, really hate guns are more likely to work for tech companies than their counterparts, at least in my experience.
Depends on the company, I have worked at a Defense Contractor for example, the sentiment towards guns was pro-guns despite the diverse political views of everyone there.
Gun ownership isn't the same thing as being anti-gun control. The majority of people, many of them gun owners and haling from both "parties", would like to see some basic restrictions on how quick and easy it is to buy a gun.
This heavily depends on what the proposed restrictions actually are - and people never seem to actually know what the current restrictions are either.
Ask for Universal Background Checks, and people say "sure". Make a national registry of firearms and criminalize loaning a rifle to a friend for a hunting trip or giving your guns to a neighbor for safekeeping while you're recovering from depression? A lot of people have now completely checked out, and it's the same damn policy. So yes, perhaps most gun owners, when polled, support "some basic restrictions on how quick and easy it is to buy a gun". But that doesn't mean they want to ban all private transfers, which is what the policy proposals always seem to be. (Guess what? Every single sale from a firearms dealer, which includes just about everyone at a gun show, requires a federal background check! And now a defacto 3+day waiting period for people under 21!)
Not to mention the absolute lunacy of "a 15 inch rifle barrel means 10 years in prison", and THAT one has been federal law for quite a few decades.
This really needs to be written / said better. It is not as easy as just thinking to yourself, I want a gun, walking into a gun store, grabbing it off a shelf, swiping a card at a self-checkout machine and walking out with a new gun in hand.
This is not the case at all.
There are states with a wait period, there are background checks, there are forms that if you lie on it is considered a felony, the person selling the gun can say no at any moment, if you are being a total creep, chances are they will not sell you a gun. In some states you cannot buy certain firearms before you're 21.
Gun control is a complicated subject. I think the anti-gun / gun control crowd should really step into a gun store and learn first hand what the experience really is when buying a firearm. They don't need to buy anything, but I guarantee the person who sells the gun will be happy to answer any and all questions they have. They literally have to know the process in order to sell guns! You have to be licensed to sell guns in a gun store.
I would support good training requirements for gun control.
You can get long guns in Europe, just that there isn't a gun culture and proper training is required. That's how it should be. I staunchly and vehemently oppose California and New York state zeitgeist on "gun control". I would not support California-style restrictions on arms that cuts citizens with a thousand paper cuts and infringes upon fundamental rights. Absolutely stupid laws that are designed for appeasing out-of-touch voter base than actually preventing crime.
I'm not sure I would count defense contractors as "tech companies". They're a different category, even if it involves technology. (If tech includes Defense, then why not also Automotive? Or financial, medical... What isn't tech at that point?)
It's pretty broad these days. Reminds me of Uber, a ride hailing company, aka taxi service. How much of the company needs to be tech vs the service? Like Bell Labs and AT&T?
The lines are either far too broad or far too fuzzy, indeed. Why is Netflix tech and not Disney? Tesla but not Ford? Amazon but not Walmart, Apple but not Dell, or Robinhood but not UBS?
Hell if I know, but I know there's a line there in my mind.
In the case of Craigslist would you call it ecommerce? Probably not, they facilitate contact between buyer and seller, they do not process payments, its not like ebay or Amazon, Uber is a fancy Craigslist.
I mean, depends on the company, the one I worked for was solely all software for example, they took a Linux distribution and made a custom distro to be installed on whatever hardware the client chose, it was very niche and single purpose. This was our primary product, our only other alternatives were all software as well. I would highly count that as a tech company.
It all depends on how you phrase it. "Supporting the Constitutional rights of Americans" will get broader approval than "protecting the rights of Neo-Nazis to march through Jewish neighborhoods", even though something is only a right when unpopular groups get it too.
If you're of the opinion that gun rights cause massive numbers of deaths in the US, then you might think supporting the NRA or any of their more extreme counterparts is unethical.
We all know how those “ethics committees” go, right? It’d immediately turn into another culture war type issue where very blatant favoritism is shown to certain charities and blatant hostility to others.
There's no grounds in the TOS to boot anything that's not a hate group as identified by the SPLC or ADL. Amazon doesn't want to get set up with a lawsuit if they boot a group outside of those bounds on either side of the aisle or if they try to change the rules to fit one group or another.
It's pretty cool that there are 19 pages with charities getting over $1k/yr. Each page has over 100 charities too! That's an insane amount of charities getting help. $1k might not seem like a lot, but for some of these groups it is, especially since it is likely in addition to other avenues of funding.
I now reflexively start typing smile.amazon.com instead of amazon.com into the url bar. Hopefully the smile url will continue to work because it's going to take me a while to unlearn.
I think it would bad PR if they just redirect to www, people that think they're still generating money for charity wouldn't be too happy once they figure it out. I've personally chosen Amazon Smile specifically because of the donations when there were plenty of other options I would rather use if I'm not getting anything out of buying from Amazon. I'm sure I wouldn't notice if it just redirected.
This is really about cost-cutting. If Amazon felt it were about being spread too thin, the obvious solution is to make a short list of charities. Or increase the amount donated.
While it's sad to see this program close, I feel like backlash isn't the answer. How are companies supposed to create beneficial programs like this if they know they're expected to keep it forever?
But if Amazon committed to Smile for 2 years, then they could say "We're re-upping our commitment for 2 more years" every 2 years, bringing even more PR for it. And when it ended, there would still be some outrage, but probably not as much.
For one, they can afford it. Two, it factors into my decision on the value of Prime to me as a consumer. Prime also offers me the ability to sub to a twitch steamer for free every week. That puts real money in creators pockets. YouTube Premium gives creators more cash when I visit than a free user. I enjoy using services that allow me to give back to creators.
I'm not talking about Amazon Smile specifically. I'm saying that if this is how people react every time a charitable program is closed/modified, then companies have less of an incentive to have these kinds of charities in the first place.
A company is essentially having to make a permanent, immutable financial commitment lest they face backlash.
Yes, Amazon has the money to continue this program. Yes, I think they should keep it around. No, I don't think it makes sense for people to go bonkers over it ending.
So it looks like animal charities are out then. A local shelter was my chosen charity. Saying that, I only generated $70 of donations with 300 orders so it wasn't much, but every little helps.
The fact that they're axing this at a time of mass layoffs makes me think they're not telling the truth.
I've managed to successfully boycott Amazon for about 3 years at this point, with very sparing business expenses that I'd do through AmazonSmile to "offset" my use of Amazon. It's good to know that that option will no longer be available to me, meaning that I will no longer have any excuse to do business with Amazon!
580 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 569 ms ] threadBut I think we can all see this for what it is — belt tightening. Will they increase other philanthropic activities to the tune of what they were previously giving away via Smile? I would be very, very surprised if so.
But these donations are not done purely for altruistic reasons — they're calculated decisions that also help the corporate entity. There's nothing wrong with this, and they'd still be doing good. But it's not the same as letting your customers decide where to donate hundreds of millions of dollars.
I suspect this is the time when the charities need smile donations the most.
Specifically Bezos' bottom line.
This is sad. I am currently at $417.30 in donations to my local charity. Amazon is in denial if they think this hasnt had an impact.
$316.62 to a grade school? Lame.
$100,000 novelty check to a board member’s favorite charity that happens to be run by his son? Now that’s pizzazz with a capital P!
> Amazon has helped fund over 20 thousand charities of your choosing. These small charities couldn't have made it without your help.
Facebook adverts picking random local charities and showing how much they've raised is far better, run them on amazon's front page too.
The local hospice I choose has raised £3k via amazon smile. That's far better PR than them giving £1m novelty cheques to some remote city based charity.
How is it better PR if hardly anybody knows about it?
The email they sent to me was they are going to take the money from my local charity and instead give it to ex Prime Minister Gordon Brown
I've seen it happen first hand in similar sized companies.
Seemed like an easy way to cut off affiliates while appearing to be generous. Maybe I'm just too cynical.
A switch in your profile which would default you to smile shouldn't have been such a big problem for a company like Amazon.
$400 million in donations to charities and Amazon has the gall to say "the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped."
According to my account page, I've generated $100.71 for the charity I selected, and, overall, they've received $273.64 as a part of the program. So I guess the charity I selected wasn't all that popular. But I expect other, more mainstream charities, were.
“Patron pages for past fiscal years” section
It would be politically inconvenient for the FSF to accept that they get donations in kind from Amazon or Microsoft, given the FSF's regular attacks on the two companies.
Sad to see this program go.
I’m surprised they couldn’t squeeze more out of this program though. With credit cards, I think the points system definitely works to make you feel better about your purchase.
Like airline miles. You can convince yourself that X number of miles is "worth" $10k because they let you fly business class to Asia. In reality you don't value that flight at $10k because you wouldn't pay $10k to fly business class if you didn't have the points.
> We don't want to send smaller amounts of money to a huge amount of charities chosen by users, since some users likely chose charities that we do not support. It also doesn't allow us to print out those huge oversized checks for photo ops. We will continue to give a bare pittance out to a small number of organizations selected for peak public relations points while minimizing cost and maximizing tax write-offs and greasing the right palms to advance our business.
> We are committed to being strategic and efficient with our charitable giving by focusing on a select number of organizations that align with our values and support our business objectives. This approach allows us to make a meaningful impact and gain positive visibility through high-impact initiatives and partnerships. Additionally, it maximizes the benefits of our charitable investments, including cost savings and tax advantages.
I always assumed Smile was mostly a way for Amazon to get me to direct that to a charity instead of a stale affiliate link.
I think charities will still get a significant amount from my purchases, since AmazonSmile was only 0.5%, while affiliate links for many categories are 4% or higher.
I particularly like that the email I got addresses me (despite the many tens of thousands of dollars I've spent through Amazon over the past two decades) as lower-case "customer." My default position on the various AWS keynotes about the power of data / personalization is "you first, buddy."
This is surprisingly honest for corporatespeak and I think reflects the god-complex which tends to follow people who spend a lot of time taking in billions of dollars.
The reality is there were a lot of charities - maybe even most of them - who were getting donations which were completely incongruent with Amazon’s moral sensibilities.
There’s no law saying they have to let customers pick, and this isn’t worth “outrage”, but I think it’s behavior which signals a lot about the way Amazon’s top leadership has shifted.
I think this will hurt smaller charities. They might not have been getting a huge donation from Smile, but I also think a lot of Smile users aren't going to consciously donate to the charity they selected - certainly not in the $5-$10 range that is probably more than most individual shoppers accounted for each term - and as a result those charities will be taking in less than before.
Smile was a good program. I have no idea what it cost Amazon to operate, but I am pretty confident it resulted in more money going to charity than whatever Amazon will now do instead.
This is an attempt to recover revenue, nothing more.
Here's Meta as an example https://about.meta.com/giving-together/
They gave $7B to all sorts of random stuff like cat shelters
Pretty much every company has some stuff like this. Don't you see think it'd be weird if Amazon was the 1 company that doesnt?
Edit: Better article here that distinguishes between Meta's matching and donation from meta users https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/fundraise-for-nonprofits-g....
My point is they are trying to sugarcoat this as focusing on specific charities, whereas I believe total donation dollars is going to drop. In addition, I think Amazon is hoping to save on costs having to manage AmazonSmile itself.
Or, a less cynical take is that they really can have more impact by focusing on fewer charities. Another commenter posted Amazon Smile's Form 990 from 2018 [1], the most recent year on Pro Publica's website that has a full listing of all the charities that received funds.
The total PDF is 2121 pages long, and the list of charities starts on page 18. They made about $37.5 million in total donations that year. The top charity, the ASPCA, received $1.8 million that year (note that the ASPCA had total revenue of $267.7 million that year). But the main point is that the charity on the top of the second page, which is only about 100 charities from the top (ordered by total amount received) received just over $10,000, and the charity at the top of the third page received $5659. And there are still over 2100 pages of charities to go!
So it seems imminently reasonable to me that, rather than give a couple hundred bucks a year to thousands and thousands and thousands of charities, to instead consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good.
1. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/46262...
I'm involved with some small makerspaces. The largest has a few hundred members.
If a quarter of them both used Smile and pledged their donations to us (a quarter is almost certainly way too high), let's say that's 100 people.
If the average person spends about $1000 on Amazon (almost certainly too high [1]), then that's $5 per person, or $500 per year total.
I guess it's something, but all those estimates are on the high end for the spaces I know, and still wouldn't cover a couple weeks' rent.
1. Prime members spend an average of $1400/yr, non-prime members spend $600, and roughly one out of the adults are prime members. https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/th...
They do great work.
Large charities leech off the existence of the problems they are claiming to solve. If they actually solved them, they wouldn't be needed any more. Name any large organization that has ever worked itself out of needing to exist. And their executives make a lot of money.
Among those people, some were chronically homeless, which basically means mentally ill, disabled and/or addicted to something. Nobody is paying for housing and health care for these people for less than $40k per year.
The majority of those people, however, are not in that group. They also didn’t stay homeless all year - over the course of one year, many times that number were nearly homeless and got help from those funds to avoid it (pay back rent to avoid eviction, pay a deposit on a new place, etc), or used these funds for services while homeless - shelter, job training, medical care, assistance applying for disability payments, etc. Besides directly funding these services, the money was also spent in paying people to manage job training programs, run the shelters, be social workers who know how disability applications work, be social workers who have to find their homeless clients to tell them about work opportunities, track available spaces in rehab programs, ……………
Your attempted equivalency there is missing so much information that it is uselessly wrong.
This opinion can lead to some really ignorant statements (which I've heard before) :
- Full time jobs at charities? Money laundering for sure, they should reject their salary and starve. - Investing in clean energy? A conspiracy, some people make money there. - Recycling? People are paid to do it, it's a sham. - Politician not forfeiting his salary? Corruption, they shouldn't make a living (or just take brides under the table).
This is an interesting take, but got me wondering, what organization _period_ has ever worked itself out of needing to exist? I'd love to hear examples.
Worse, there is a well-known phenomenon [1] where if people's "guilt" is taken away, then they are less likely to donate overall. That is, for at least some portion of people, they probably mark a small charity as their Amazon Smile recipient and then think "Great, I'm donating to charity!", not realizing their donations are like 50 cents. But if they didn't sign up for Amazon Smile they might be more likely to actually donate a real amount.
To be clear, I'm all for small charities getting money, but I'd almost rather it be like a lottery or something so a smaller number of small charities could get money they could actually do something with.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...
Funny sidenote is that my chosen charity was actually ProPublica
Internally, employees have begged for literally decades for an employee donation matching program (similar to Microsoft's donation matching) and have been stonewalled for years, with upper leadership not wanting to give a firm answer as to why.
Meanwhile, most of the philanthropic endeavors that Amazon does offer its employees internally are in some way otherwise related to things that Jeff has a fiduciary tie to or where doing so was politically motivated to turn a blind eye to the rapid expansion of the Downtown/SLU Seattle Campus.
- certain large universities
- certain large hospitals
And that's it. I wrote to HR multiple times asking if my local health related charity could be part of their matching donations. Finally got a terse answer saying "no, only the ones on the list."
Some enterprises are so scared of anything remotely resembling controversy that they severely restrict matching, and others just don't offer it at all.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is fantastic about employee matching.
I bet if the offered round up for charity in the checkout process the funds collected would dwarf those raised by the smile program.
Not "actual worth to society."
A market based, consumer driven approach like Amazon Smile, is likely optimal.
Consumers, on average, are very effective and logical choosers (on average).
Amazon Smile was likely a highly effective program.
Issue is, Amazon now wants to redirect its customer's dollars to improve its reputation.
There's something very "early 21st century social trust crisis" about keeping the "capitalist utlitarianism" logos of neoliberalism while throwing out the "democratized decision making" ethos of neoliberalism.
Like, I get it, it’s not just a slush fund, but maybe it sort of should be. Does every dollar spent have to have clear ROI? Where’s the charity?
Carefully recorded in tax filings.
A coworker had an interested high school student come in for the day/week a few times, and shadow them.
For many kids whose parents have never heard of white collar work, it can be life changing to have a good impression.
I am highly skeptical of wisdom of utilitarianism in charitable giving. No one has non-toy models so the math is all made up nonsense. More importantly, proximity between the giver and the recipient has profound agency effects that are completely ignored by most utilitarians. You tend to get better outcomes when you allow agents to center their personal projects, even if resources aren't optimally allocated when ignoring this "agent centering effect".
Put another way, not every (e.g.) $5000 yields the same impact.
More in fewer hands? Where have we've seen that before? How's that working out for us?
It also gives Amazon much more control over the charity. If you give $1000 to a charity, they are happy and do their thing. If you give a charity $1,000,000 your priorities are going to become their priorities.
Specifically, where it can most efficiently buy image and influence for Amazon. For profit corporations charitable donations, like any other expenditures of corporate funds, are made to advance the commercial interests of the corporation.
I don't often click on affiliate links, but I also don't recall seeing the smile reminder when I have used them. YMMV I guess.
It's hard not to be cynical when you look at the charities they are focusing on. All of them are in-house, and seem positioned to strongly benefit Amazon. Like the one where they brag about building houses near the Amazon major headquarters.
Honestly, this seems rather impressive. A lot higher than I thought! That's great! The reason I expected lower is because these tend to follow power laws with a very steep decline. The 200th charity makes more than half what the 100th charity makes is pretty good. I had to go through 19 pages of charities (I counted 126 lines on one page, but I probably miscounted so +/- some) before I started to see them go below $1k. That's quite impressive though, there's over 2k charities getting over $1k
Seriously. Amazon is literally just writing a check, or just as likely, putting store credit in an account.
Where do they figure in to donating at all beyond a middle man?
Seriously, how does Amazon differ than GoFundMe in this context? And as a follow up, if this is such a good move for “effectiveness” why shouldn’t GoFundMe do they same thing?
I've now opted for the "free" shipping that you get when you spend $25+. Items that I cannot wait for I will buy local, which usually now offer same day delivery.
That doesn't sound entirely artificial to me, though? It seems more likely that they're reserving stock in closer (and likely, more expensive) warehouses for people who are paying for two day shipping, either by having a Prime membership or by paying for the shipping.
While there are definitely periods where I would have agreed with you, recently Amazon has seriously increased the % of products which are deliverable same day.
It's also not just for common items. I can buy a thermocouple amplifier board and have it delivered today. It really scratches an itch when you can get components for a project delivered THAT DAY. I could be playing with thermocouples TODAY. Hard to resist.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FZZ2FDK
The corporate justification part of amazon smile was in the same effort as any charity in purchase which is to make the consumer feel empowered, righteous and moral for the decision to consume a product. Charity tie ins like rainforest donations or carbon offsets are designed to incense consumers to evangelize. They're designed to eliminate buyers remorse returns and blunt the often ever present reality of sweat shop labor. That anyone got real money from this is just a happy side effect.
This reminds me of a cartoon that shows a field of sheep and a billboard with a wolf captioned "I will eat you", and one of the sheep says admiringly, "He really tells it like it is."
We need less, not more, of this. Ending this program is absolutely wrong, and the wrong is not lessened because they are being honest about their greed.
I guess with the current economic downturn, Amazon has decided that there is insufficient margin to continue taking a cut out and donating it to charity.
I'm guessing the administrative burden of so many organizations is a big driver behind the shutdown.
Some retail has a 75%+ markup as standard at the store. That's why they're able to regularly offer sales where they take 25%, 50%, even 75% off: it's not just to clear out unsold inventory; many retailers that do this are still making a profit at those prices.
Amazon, being a "sell everything and more" retailer, certainly doesn't get to enjoy those high profit margins for all their products, but they also definitely do not have to deal with the razor-thin margins of other sectors across the board. They get to average it out nicely somewhere in the middle.
Similarly, clothing often has some ridiculous sticker price, because the entire point of the sticker price is to be marked down in one of the seemingly perpetual sales that retailers have. I remember that J.C. Penney, when they hired Apple head of retail Ron Johnson, tried to change this practice, by setting the list price of clothing closer to the price that they paid, eschewing having sales. It was a disaster [1]. Customers had become accustomed to seeing large markdowns, and when those markdowns weren't there, they waited (or shopped at other retailers which continued to offer markdowns).
Just because the sticker price has a 75% (or 2-300%, in the case of watches) markup doesn't mean the retailer actually expects to make that margin on anything except a small fraction of sales.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/02/24/a...
By being able to choose who go the donations, it felt empowering and less likely the company was using charity to pursue secondary interests.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/46262...
It's less a college educated versus not and more an urban versus rural issue.
The general mistrust of academia, liberal arts and mainstream science amongst the rural populace suggests those issues overlap quite a bit.
You might be confusing correlation as something more substantive
Group B: College Educated + Rural
Group C: No post-secondary + Urban
Group D: No post-secondary + Rural
Fairly simple analysis to do, and I suspect (as I think you do) that the trend will align with a split between A/D vs B/C not A/B vs C/D.
I'm not making any claims one way or another. All I'm saying is knee-jerk assumptions based on a simplified mental model probably isn't a good idea unless you have the data to back it up. (Especially true on complex systems like human value systems).
The people who really, really hate guns are more likely to work for tech companies than their counterparts, at least in my experience.
Also, Amazon in particular has long banned the sale of a large variety of gun components on their platform - even those that aren't regulated in any state. (bolts, barrels, handguards, stocks... oddly enough they do allow optics)
Depends on the company, I have worked at a Defense Contractor for example, the sentiment towards guns was pro-guns despite the diverse political views of everyone there.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem...
Ask for Universal Background Checks, and people say "sure". Make a national registry of firearms and criminalize loaning a rifle to a friend for a hunting trip or giving your guns to a neighbor for safekeeping while you're recovering from depression? A lot of people have now completely checked out, and it's the same damn policy. So yes, perhaps most gun owners, when polled, support "some basic restrictions on how quick and easy it is to buy a gun". But that doesn't mean they want to ban all private transfers, which is what the policy proposals always seem to be. (Guess what? Every single sale from a firearms dealer, which includes just about everyone at a gun show, requires a federal background check! And now a defacto 3+day waiting period for people under 21!)
Not to mention the absolute lunacy of "a 15 inch rifle barrel means 10 years in prison", and THAT one has been federal law for quite a few decades.
This really needs to be written / said better. It is not as easy as just thinking to yourself, I want a gun, walking into a gun store, grabbing it off a shelf, swiping a card at a self-checkout machine and walking out with a new gun in hand.
This is not the case at all.
There are states with a wait period, there are background checks, there are forms that if you lie on it is considered a felony, the person selling the gun can say no at any moment, if you are being a total creep, chances are they will not sell you a gun. In some states you cannot buy certain firearms before you're 21.
Gun control is a complicated subject. I think the anti-gun / gun control crowd should really step into a gun store and learn first hand what the experience really is when buying a firearm. They don't need to buy anything, but I guarantee the person who sells the gun will be happy to answer any and all questions they have. They literally have to know the process in order to sell guns! You have to be licensed to sell guns in a gun store.
You can get long guns in Europe, just that there isn't a gun culture and proper training is required. That's how it should be. I staunchly and vehemently oppose California and New York state zeitgeist on "gun control". I would not support California-style restrictions on arms that cuts citizens with a thousand paper cuts and infringes upon fundamental rights. Absolutely stupid laws that are designed for appeasing out-of-touch voter base than actually preventing crime.
Hell if I know, but I know there's a line there in my mind.
If you're of the opinion that gun rights cause massive numbers of deaths in the US, then you might think supporting the NRA or any of their more extreme counterparts is unethical.
not to mention the ethical backflips you’d have to use to distinguish the SAF from the ACLU.
That said, username definitely checks out.
It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It is pretty fascinating to read down the list and see what kind of orgs common people chose to donate to.
I wish there was a searchable text version.
> ... wind down AmazonSmile by February 20, 2023
I expect cynical HN commenters would make the similarly snarky comments about how X company is only committing to Y time period.
But if Amazon committed to Smile for 2 years, then they could say "We're re-upping our commitment for 2 more years" every 2 years, bringing even more PR for it. And when it ended, there would still be some outrage, but probably not as much.
A company is essentially having to make a permanent, immutable financial commitment lest they face backlash.
Yes, Amazon has the money to continue this program. Yes, I think they should keep it around. No, I don't think it makes sense for people to go bonkers over it ending.
The fact that they're axing this at a time of mass layoffs makes me think they're not telling the truth.