Evil is as Evil Does

Amazon is shuttering its "Smile" donation program, claiming that it was not having sufficient impact.

Rather unsurprisingly, the program was not an attempt at charity, instead, it was an attempt to game Google out of referral fees for its advertisements.

Even by the standards of Amazon and Jeff Bezos, this it profoundly crass and rapacious:

You may have heard last week that Amazon has announced the end of its “AmazonSmile” program, in which you could shop at Amazon, and a portion of all of the money you paid would actually go to the charity of your choice. Amazon claimed that the program “has not grown to create the impact we had originally hoped” and (perhaps reasonably!) implied that the overhead of delivering small amounts to many different charities was not very efficient. The company noted that the “average” donation to charities was less than $230 per charity. ………

Some people, naturally, assumed that Amazon was doing this to claw back some of the money that it had previously been sending to the various non-profits. But, it appears the actual story here may be even more crazy.

Soon after the news broke, there was a fascinating post on Reddit from someone claiming they used to work at Amazon corporate and was around when the Smile program was launched, and claimed that the program was never designed to be as generous as it was presented. It was really just designed to fuck over Google and have to pay that company less in referral fees. 

………


While there’s no way to prove that this person really did work there, it does sound accurate, and another commenter backed this up, with credible additional info: 

………

Later on that same commenter notes that another “side benefit” to doing this was to push back on some local news stories that had slammed Bezos for not being involved in enough charitable works. So this kinda killed multiple birds with a single “look at how good we’re being” stone.

From all that, I’m wondering if Amazon is now realizing that the overhead of handling this program just wasn’t worth it any more, and the fact that they made it so difficult to use didn’t really stop that many people from Google, so if they have to just write a slightly larger check to Google that’s easier than having a team figuring out how to send hundred dollar checks to charities.

I will be so glad when the antitrust folks come after these folks.