The store takes your donation, then they donate it and take all the credit.
“Store name” donated $1 million to XYZ Charity.
Not only do they get the credit, they also get tax benefits from the donation.
Update: Seems I am incorrect! Thanks for the polite discourse.
I don’t think they can get a tax break, but they definitely get the media attention.
Well if they donate that money to their own charity then I’m sure they figure out some way to keep most of it. "Admin costs " and such.
They totally do, at least in the USA they do. Well documented corporate practice.
edit: FALSE! Was this ever true? I was indeed confident. No longer, for now… Thanks for bringing all the receipts, so to speak.
I thought so too.
Assuming the business is following the law, it will not include your donation as part of its business receipts, or income, nor will it claim the charitable gift as an expense.
In other words, your gift has zero impact on the store’s income taxes. Keep in mind that the store chooses the receiving charity, so make sure it is one you can support. As a customer, the donation will appear on your receipt and you can claim it as a charitable deduction when you file your income tax return.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-gets-tax-benefit-those-checkout-donations-0
Bring the proof. Because it’s a myth.
So, let’s see your documentation please.
They make a dollar, they donate a dollar. No change to tax.
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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.
My grandparents ALWAYS CALLED THIS A SCAM
As far as the world knows, they did. It was the $20 you gave them.
and you didn’t give them $20 so they had to let the orphans starve, nothing they could do.
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.
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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
Those are probably their ‘carbon offsets’ too so already making money and trying to make more on it.
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?
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.
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
Write-offs are deductions from income, not reductions in taxes owed. They only get to deduct the taxes they would have paid if they had kept the donations.
Let’s imagine their annual income was $10,000,000. Their nominal tax rate would have them owing $2,100,000.
If they received a $100,000 in donations, that would make their income 10,100,000. But with the donations they could write off the 100 grand, reducing their tax bill by $21,000, for a total of $2,100,000.
Either way, they pay the same in taxes with or without the donations.
I stand corrected, thanks! I always assume they’re finding a way to directly enrich themselves further, because they often are.
It ends up being net zero. They’re only writing off the money you donated. They still have to count the money you donated towards their overall revenue, increasing their tax bill, but then they pass the donation on, allowing them to write it off, reducing their overall revenue (and thus their tax bill) to what it would have been if you hadn’t donated.
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.
I’ve been saying this for years.
Infuriates me as well. I don’t think they realize how it looks and sounds in 2026.
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.
I don’t know how it is in your country but last time I checked, it was not used as tax writeoff. Are you sure it is the case ? Because I hear this a lot on the internet and no one bother to check if this is true or not.
It appears as of 2021, you are correct. I still suspect funny business going on but I think you’re right about the taxes.
Edit: I do think that corporations are able to write off fees and services associated with collecting the donations such as technical and administrative costs though its likely very small in comparison to actual donations.
More likely the donations help with employee and customer retention/morale.
If it could be verified that they at least matched donations, they might have better luck
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.
I had a dream where pretty much the same prompt came up but it was offering me a discount for being poor
