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
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
some shell sponsored forests
I initially read “forests” as “fascists”
Those are probably their ‘carbon offsets’ too so already making money and trying to make more on it.
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.
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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.
No, that’s not how it works. All they get from the donation is good PR.
A lot of billionaires have their own charities.
You telling me they only do it for PR?
I don’t believe it. That’s just not consistent with their greed.
I’m sure that the charitable image is part of it. But I don’t think they are doing it for only that reason.
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
The receipt thing is a lifeprotip. I didn’t know that.
I always donate directly to organizations because I didn’t think I could get taxes back on it if you donate in a store.
Thank you.
IANAL! Double check.
I prefer “NSA” to “IANAL” because “No soy abogado” means “I’m not a lawyer” in spanish, which is nice because then we don’t have to inadvertently think OP just told everyone he engages in anal sex every time we see the acronym.
Are your itemized deductions usually more than the standard deduction? If not it’s pointless to claim it.
You should at least Google the appropriate laws before being this confidently incorrect.
Bring the proof. Because it’s a myth.
So, let’s see your documentation please.
False. This is an oft repeated myth.
This old myth still… They do not get any tax benefits. That’s not how taxes work. The donation is your donation. You can claim it on your own taxes if you itemize deductions.
They make a dollar, they donate a dollar. No change to tax.
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That is wrong on so many levels, but it is so true. What if our brains actually think this?
And they get credit for donating even tho it was actually their customers.
In many cases they also cause the child hunger by paying their employees a wage so low that food assistance is required.
They do not get credit for facilitating your donation. This is a misunderstanding of how donating works based on when I looked it up after saying the same thing. They do it mainly to virtue signal. Either way I share the sentiment of the post.
I think by credit he means they get to brag about how much they “donated”.
Everyone should know by now they don’t get any tax advantages.
If only in the form of a tax break. You’re literally donating to the company asking for the cash.
Donations through a non profit, where the CEO and/or some of their family are on the board and paid a big salary from those donations, so only a fraction makes it to the stated goal.
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.
So what you’re saying is you’d rather have your money taken from you by force, as long as it’s lawful and you get to pretend you have a say in how it’s used…
I think what they are saying is that they’d rather the burden be distributed equitably across the populace instead of placing the burden entirely on good people.
You really think bad people pay taxes? They’re the ones collecting them!
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They want you to give them a tax break. It’s a scam like all capitalism is.
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 donate a fair bit of money relative to my income bracket. Sometimes it’s directly to places that need it. Sometimes it’s by donating goods instead of money. Sometimes it’s by entering raffles at work, or buying candy from kids at the store, or a coupon book from veterans.
And sometimes it’s by donating at the till. Look, corpos suck. But one of the only good things they do is solicit donations at the till.
Stores process thousands and thousands of transactions a day, and if even only a handful of those people decide to round up or add a little bit more on top, it adds up to so much money for good causes that I guarantee would not otherwise ever get donated.
And please, please can we put this myth to rest: in no country that I am aware of can a company claim your donations on their taxes. Those donations are yours and yes, you can claim them on your taxes if you are willing to do the work of keeping the receipt and itemizing your deductions. I do this every single year.
They don’t claim it on their taxes, they claim it in marketing
Correct, and I did not repudiate that. It is a bargain that I think is worth striking.
Those donations are yours and yes, you can claim them on your taxes if you are willing to do the work of keeping the receipt and itemizing your deductions. I do this every single year.
Fwiw in Australia only donations over $2 are tax deductible. So round-up donations probably aren’t, unless you’re rounding from $47.95 to $50 or something.
Good to know, thanks!
Oh, for Pete’s sake! If you don’t want to donate, don’t donate, but at least get the facts, please. There’s plenty of stuff in the world to get angry about right now that’s real. In reality:
- The store has to book your donation as “unearned revenue,” that is, money it collected, but is not theirs. Charitable donations collected through the registers do not count as the store’s income. Giving the lump sum to the charity does not count as a store expense. The store is merely a custodian of the money until transferring it to the charity.
- YOU get the tax deduction, not the store. If you itemize your tax deductions (and do not take the standard deduction), you can submit the register receipt as proof of a donation, and get the tax benefit.
- The media coverage of these donations for PR benefit is basically nil. Off the top of your head, name the last 3 feel-good stories about grocery store charity donations that you saw in the news. (Can you name even one? I can’t.)
- Stores often do add some of their own money to the donation, but charitable donations are an “above the line” adjustment to income, not a “below the line” refundable credit. That is, the value of the write-off is the amount of tax the store avoided, which is always less then the amount of money it gave.
Last time I was at a grocery, and the payment terminal asked my to round up, I did. I see it as a win-win-win. I win because I can feel good about donating, even if it was only 14 cents. The store wins by some of my good feelings transferring to it; as well, the people who run the store are human, and also want to feel good about themselves by helping a charity. The charity itself wins by getting a couple thousand dollars that it wouldn’t have received otherwise. Despite my best intentions, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to donate to that organization, and absolutely would not have bothered to give a tiny amount like 14 cents. But every little bit helps, and a few cents each from hundreds people adds up. I see this as a frictionless way to do some good.
Source: Used to work at a family-owned grocery store.
You think people working at a multibillion dollar grocery chain give a crap about your 14¢ round-up? It’s implied this is not some “family owned” small store.
Do you think anyone keeps grocery receipts at tax time to claim the $5 write off over the year with 30 receipt’s worth of round-ups?
The meme is essentially true. A big corp is asking a nobody who is probably trying to save some cash to give a billion dollar operation money so the Big Corp gets the brownie points for the donation. They don’t give a shit about you other than “Big Grocer & ‘customers’” donate $$$.
The only two points you made that I agree with are “just say no” if you don’t want to, and donate if you like the good feels. Just make sure Big Grocery is donating to a charity that is decent and doesn’t soak up most of the $ in admin costs.
The meme is fine, it’s the comments. If a business is following the law, the business must pass along the full amount of donated money, and does not get a tax deduction. I tried to look up some numbers, and found that many companies do not even report the amounts they collect, so they’re not doing it for media coverage. Agree with me or not, those are the facts.
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.
The amount of misconceptions and misunderstandings regarding how taxes work is astounding.
See also: tax brackets. No, getting bumped up to the next tax bracket won’t cause you to make less money after taxes. There are some benefits cliffs that do work like this (e.g. ACA subsidies), but those are different than income taxes.
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.
If they donate money out of their own profits, they CAN write that off. Which of course is also money you gave them, except it’s money you gave them in order to buy their products, not for the purpose of having them donate it.
I often pass an intersection where a woman is selling ice cold water bottles, and in the other direction, her husband (I assume) is selling flowers. I almost always buy 2 bottles of water from her.
I know that my money is going directly to help a hard working family, instead of some “charity,” where only about 20% goes to the actual research, while executives take millions in compensation.
I used to watch this happen all the time in South Carolina where I used to live… But I also used to do it myself, I’d be like, well hell if we’re gonna sit out here and panhandle, we might as well do it in a group! You knew one thing - that caused a need for - the other thing and then - that other thing would belong to the next thing. It’s a good base strategy.
