edit: you should also know that you should just donate directly to the charity, but I thought that was common knowledge
Apparently the idea that it gives corporations a tax break is a misconception, rather, YOU get the tax break! edit: yes you have to have receipts, thought that was common knowledge and didn’t think i needed a disclaimer
Thanks to @TheRealKuni@piefed.social, @iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works, and @Zorcron@piefed.zip for that info!
edit: sorry for posting this, leaving it up so it’s not a “dirty delete”
A couple of things here, this is of course a pressure donation where people don’t get the time to think about who they are giving to.
If a company does it right it should have information about the charity readily available. If not, this is a shitty practice in my book.
Many nonprofits have a high overhead. If this is the case a big percentage of your donation could be going into the pockets of administrators.
Also, while the company doesn’t get direct benefits, it does get indirect. Like a goodwill vampire the company is leeching on the act of giving.
Lastly, while the company doesn’t directly financial benefit there are no rules saying they can’t promote a charity that their employees/owners/shareholders have involvement in.
While this may not be a bad thing there is nothing preventing them from picking a charity a major share holder runs thus enriching them especially if the nonprofit has high administrative costs.
This is why I just always default to “no thank you.” I Donate to charities, and I am lucky to have an employer that matches donations and I take the time to use that program. I research who I make donations to and never do it on a whim.
I don’t give a fuck about a tax break or not. They are the multi million, billion, dollar company. Fuck your profits and you donate.
It’s like tipping. Pay your employees.
They do donate.
And that’s great! But to the poster’s point, don’t worry about coercing the customer to.
It’s not coercement. It’s literally a hey do you want to help out this organization. Most normal people don’t have a way and don’t know a way to actually donate. This is a way for normal people to provide donations for organizations that we feel could use them. And yes these organizations do actually get the donations. For example The Smiths here in town or Kroger as they’re known Nationwide donates to the primary children’s hospital all the time. Yes I do provide them a direct check and they do usually a matching dollar for dollar for everything that’s donated so if 50,000 people donate a dollar each the company will donate an extra $50,000 on top of that. I see nothing wrong with that and you shouldn’t see anything wrong with that either.
Fuck corporate ‘charities’, regardless
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.
So we all know how honest and kind hearted all the billionaires are. But still, is there any watchdog monitoring them, that they actually really do not use customer donations as their own?
Sorry downvoted.
Doesn’t matter, you are still helping them in terms of PR.
“Oh look how good we are, we are a benevolent corpo that raised X Million dollars”
Nah, if you want, you should be donating directly to the cause. Don’t let corpos get good PR for nothing.
i agree, the point of my post is to clarify the misconception, especially for anyone who may have donated in the past and felt guilty about it
The truth is the truth, even if it doesn’t fit your anti-corpo narrative.
This I knew, but since the charties they’re giving to are usually unknown entities to me and there’s so much charity fraud in the world around me, I’ve never donated on the spot like that before.
I donate to things on my own time after researching, not under pressure. It’s more out of caution however.
Companies collecting for charities while underpaying staff and avoiding taxes is certainly horrible enough to not trust that they are going to pick valid charities.
It sucks being put on the spot to donate to a charity I haven’t researched, but I’ve also been a cashier and hated being forced to ask people shit like this.
The worst is when it’s really vague. “Would you like to round up to help veterans?” How? What charity is it? Are we talking homeless vets or “freedom flights” hauling old war vets to the respective memorials? I need details, and some advertising of said charity so I know that the charity in question expects money, assuming there even is one.
in the USA, if you keep all your receipts and log them with the tax people
Its not going to be worth the effort for the huge majority of people unless you donate a lot of money because of the standard deduction. Its a stupid system but it is what it is.
Also if you’re taking itemized deductions instead of the standard deduction which is usually a bad call for the majority of people.
in the USA
til lemmy lets you edit post titles, very cool. i fixed it, thanks!
Loool, what a bootlicker BS headline then! Thank you for your time to tell us.
The corp doesn’t get the tax break either way.
You only get it if you claim it (in the US), of course. Nobody is tracking that for you.
Oh, well that’s on me for only reading the headline then (and assuming the worst from corpos at every step).
from your post history it seems you might not be in the us so i’m going to try and clarify
soooo i have yet to file taxes (i’m disabled and have never made enough to file) but from my understanding, how taxes work in the us vs outside of the us is different
the government doesn’t tell you what you owe or what to deduct… you tell them what you owe, what you’re deducting, and hope you didn’t mess up somewhere unless you want to be shipped off the el salvador
so i believe neither my post nor their comment is bs, but if i’m wrong i’m happy to be corrected
(i’m disabled and have never made enough to file)
You have to file no matter what. You’re risking an IRS investigation you probably can’t afford.
Your post isnt wrong, but you just have to keep in mind that for the huge majority of people in the US, keeping receipts of small donations is pointless, because they will never exceed the standard deduction, which every filer gets. As an example, the 2025 standard deduction for single filers in 2025 is 15,750.
So unless all your charity deductions and other deductions exceed that amount, you should be taking the standard deduction anyways, and all the receipts count for nothing, and are a waste of time to enter.
Yeah no gotcha, I’ve known it to work similarly. Also, didn’t mean it as an attack on you per se (unless you wrote the headline I guess).
The situation seems to me to be that companies obviously assume (I’d guess rightly) that a huge majority of people don’t keep these itemised receipts in order to claim the tax from these minuscule transactions themselves, thus enabling the company to get the tax break.
The company has no way of knowing whether the person claimed the donation, so that wouldn’t be possible.
The company does it entirely for the PR.
Well, file taxes and tell us how that went. Because if you didn’t keep the receipts as a record of the exact amount and proof of those donations, you don’t get to submit them for a tax break. Vibes and memories don’t cut it for tax deductions.
So yeah the customer technically gets that tax break, but its more work than it’s worth to actually claim it.
yeah? never said otherwise.
This topic always causes a lot of negative comments whenever it’s mentioned. Far more people falsely claim there’s a corporate tax benefit compared to people reminding that it’s not true.
There’s a secondary factor: when you donate through the company, they have an increase in gross profit without an increase in revenue. It’s actually worse on their balance sheet from a performance standpoint. Not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things tho.
The corporation does not get a tax break.
They get the PR, and they get some leverage over the org they’re donating to. But, you know, the leverage is that they stop collecting money to the org, so if you refuse to give in the first place then…
It’s better to give to the charities of your choice without needing some other corp to effectively advertise and collect for them, but that seems unlikely. It probably is helpful that someone is out there advertising. It may be worth making that deal with the corp.
Does it matter if they don’t get a tax break? They’re still generally billion dollar companies.
In my town there’s mostly Safeways, which are owned by Albertsons, which is owned by Cerberus Capital Management, which has something like $65 billion in assets and a net worth of $3 billion. I don’t give a flying fuck if they don’t get a tax break, they could just make the fucking donations on behalf of their fucking customers since they have so much god damned money.
EDIT: Albertsons gets 34 million weekly customers. That’s around 1.7 billion yearly customers. They could make a dollar donation for every customer for a year and still be worth 1.3 billion.
One could even consider it good news that the company doesn’t get a tax break from money donated by the customer.
yeah, this is what i was going for
i’m not here to defend billionaires. i’m chronically ill and probably going to die young, suffering, and in poverty. if billionaires did the right thing, not only would i probably be suffering a lot less, but so would a lot of people. we’d probably have a better world.
but here we are. :(
None of you people know how the standard deduction and taxes work 🤦♂️.
99.9% of the people in this forum will never itemize ever.
And this is the same in every country in the world?
This is lemmy.world - there only is one country.
you’re right, i fixed it! my bad 😅
