To preempt the inevitable: no, companies do not take your donations and then use them as a tax write off to somehow profit. That’s a myth. That’s not how taxes work. Those donations are yours and you can claim them on your taxes. Yes, really.
It’s not the tax write off. It’s that the companies like to white wash their image though these types of charities at the counter. They could just donate a portion of their profits instead. I don’t need my charitable donations to be impulse purchases when I’m trying to grab some milk.
They’ll also use the customer donations in their own marketing materials with carefully chosen wording.
“We put $X in the hands of X charity!” Sounds cute, until you realize why they don’t say they “donated $X” instead. It’s because it’s often not their money or donation.
To preempt the inevitable: no, companies do not take your donations and then use them as a tax write off to somehow profit. That’s a myth. That’s not how taxes work. Those donations are yours and you can claim them on your taxes. Yes, really.
It’s not the tax write off. It’s that the companies like to white wash their image though these types of charities at the counter. They could just donate a portion of their profits instead. I don’t need my charitable donations to be impulse purchases when I’m trying to grab some milk.
They’ll also use the customer donations in their own marketing materials with carefully chosen wording.
“We put $X in the hands of X charity!” Sounds cute, until you realize why they don’t say they “donated $X” instead. It’s because it’s often not their money or donation.
Exactly.
The other thing is that when you research the charity they’re promoting they tend to score pretty poorly.
Yeah if they really fucking cared, the machine would ask “how much of our profit in this sale should we donate to charity.”
Then you don’t pay anything extra, and they can take the tax write off. (And lose the profit.)
Lol of course they will never do this.
Yes, they get good publicity typically. Charities also get a butt load of money they would not have otherwise got.
That’s exactly what a CEO would say hmmm
They definitely don’t profit but don’t donations lighten a corporation’s tax liability?
No. They literally just said that’s not how it works.
But to add to this: maybe do your own research. Don’t take strangers’ words at face value. And don’t take every search result at face value either.