Amazon is another tech giant that’s trying to cut costs, and one of the latest casualties appears to be AmazonSmile, the company’s charity donation program. According to a letter that was recently addressed to customers, Amazon plans to wind down AmazonSmile next month by February 20, 2023, a decade after the initiative was originally launched. AmazonSmile is program that allows customers to donate 0.5% of their eligible purchases to the charitable organization of their choice.
From an Amazon post:
We are writing to let you know that we plan to wind down AmazonSmile by February 20, 2023. We will continue to pursue and invest in other areas where we’ve seen we can make meaningful change—from building affordable housing to providing access to computer science education for students in underserved communities to using our logistics infrastructure and technology to assist broad communities impacted by natural disasters.
To help charities that have been a part of the AmazonSmile program with this transition, we will be providing them with a one-time donation equivalent to three months of what they earned in 2022 through the program, and they will also be able to accrue additional donations until the program officially closes in February. Once AmazonSmile closes, charities will still be able to seek support from Amazon customers by creating their own wish lists.
AmazonSmile’s shuttering is complemented by reports of the company making its biggest round of job cuts ever. The retail giant is planning to lay off as many as 18,000 workers around the globe, with many already having received the bad news in regions that include the US, Canada, and Costa Rica. Doug Herrington, the Amazon’s worldwide retail chief, said that this is part of an effort to lower costs so the company can “continue investing in the wide selection, low prices and fast shipping that our customers love.”
Discussion (4 replies)
Join Discussion →That's rather shitty. Is the overhead of Amazon smile that high, or is it simply a case of it shows money out as opposed to money in with a % userbase so low as to not threaten their broader user base appreciably.
Also I read somewhere that they were not cutting hourly workers. Makes me wonder if they are finding teams that have a net 'cost' within the company and are writing them out as easy losses. Remove Amazon Smile. Remove tasks from IT workers managing site. Allocate tasks from workers that have been released to these workers. = net same workload.
You know typical crap the bean counters do, that only sees the books of Task X takes Hours Y. Worker 1 has 3 hours free. Split task X between Workers 1 and 42. Now all work can be completed with no over time or additional effort needed outside of normal working hours.
Not understand that they people they fired had the process refined so it only took THEM x hours of effort. Someone else coming in will need xx hours per week to complete the same task until they get up to speed and automate what they can how the worker that was let go did it.
Also if Amazon is like old school IBM a lot of these workers will 'retire' and come back as contractors their by double dipping the benefit trough.
I'm guessing mostly contractors. But hey you know Bezos needs that $$$ to pay for his spaceships.
If it were all contractors it wouldn't even make the news. Back around the Y2k or 2001 stock market debacle I was working for IBM. Got a call from my consulting company I was contracting though. 1040 to them, then they billed IBM. IBM was lowering rates across the board for contracts by 10% no negotiations. Leave or take less. They tried to pass that on to me. Back then I was making crap... like less than 40k and the hit would have pushed me down into the 20k range. I told them in no uncertain terms that I would not be eating that loss and they need to absorb it as I was well aware that for my lack of education background I was already drastically underpaid compared to my compatriots.
Needless to say that never got passed on to me. I still left after a couple years but yea... companies screw over consultants left and right and it doesn't make the news because it's just expected. Being an employee of a publicly traded company means you are an valued asset and anything done in mass to those assets has to be reported to shareholders. Otherwise you're just a rental car with a damage waiver. They will drive you hard, make you drive up a mountain, overheat, and never change the oil or worry about any sort of maintenance before returning you and getting another 'new' rental.
I never understood the economics of AmazonSmile.
I used the Smile storefront. Stuff cost the same. A magic 0.5% would get passed on to a non-profit of your choice. Trouble was, many of the non-profits in the system didn't have updated information, so they wouldn't get the checks. After trying a couple of local small ones in my area, and finding out it wasn't doing jack squat, I just set it to Red Cross and figured "what the hell, it doesn't cost anything extra".
So, a magic 0.5% came from somewhere and was being passed on because... I guess they hoped it would make more people shop at Amazon for stuff? I don't know.
Kind of a shame to see it go, but I can see why Amazon would drop it, it wasn't exactly driving traffic to them or providing any real benefit, other than perhaps a PR bump in saying they donated $XYZ each year and "You helped!"
So... similar topic:
Is there a browser extension or anything that will auto-add referral links to stuff I buy? I could be tossing this site some pennies when I begrudgingly use Amazon.