Text of the notice sent: Dear customer, In 2013, we launched AmazonSmile to make it easier for customers to support their favorite charities. However, after almost a decade, the program has not...
Text of the notice sent:
Dear customer,
In 2013, we launched AmazonSmile to make it easier for customers to support their favorite charities. However, after almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations—more than 1 million globally—our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin.
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.
As a company, we will continue supporting a wide range of other programs that help thousands of charities and communities across the U.S. For instance:
Housing Equity Fund: We’re investing $2 billion to build and preserve affordable housing in our hometown communities. In just two years, we’ve provided funding to create more than 14,000 affordable homes—and we expect to build at least 6,000 more in the coming months. These units will host more than 18,000 moderate- to low-income families, many of them with children. In one year alone, our investments have been able to increase the affordable housing stock in communities like Bellevue, Washington and Arlington, Virginia by at least 20%.
Amazon Future Engineer: We’ve funded computer science curriculum for more than 600,000 students across over 5,000 schools—all in underserved communities. We have plans to reach an additional 1 million students this year. We’ve also provided immediate assistance to 55,000 students in our hometown communities by giving them warm clothes for the winter, food, and school supplies.
Community Delivery Program: We’ve partnered with food banks in 35 U.S. cities to deliver more than 23 million meals, using our logistics infrastructure to help families in need access healthy food – and we plan to deliver 12 million more meals this year alone. In addition to our delivery services, we’ve also donated 30 million meals in communities across the country.
Amazon Disaster Relief: We’re using our logistics capabilities, inventory, and cloud technology to provide fast aid to communities affected by natural disasters. For example, we’ve created a Disaster Relief Hub in Atlanta with more than 1 million relief items ready for deployment, our Disaster Relief team has responded to more than 95 natural disasters, and we’ve donated more than 20 million relief products to nonprofits assisting communities on the ground.
Community Giving: We support hundreds of local nonprofits doing meaningful work in cities where our employees and their families live. For example, each year we donate hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations working to build stronger communities, from youth sport leagues, to local community colleges, to shelters for families experiencing homelessness.
We’ll continue working to make a difference in many ways, and our long-term commitment to our communities remains the same—we’re determined to do every day better for our customers, our employees, and the world at large.
Times are hard. Manufacturing costs are up, prices are skyrocketing, our customers are balking at the increased cost of Amazon Prime, we’re facing a variety of lawsuits, and lawyers are expensive. As a result, even though our sales are up 15 percent year over year, our shareholders are getting nervous. So we’re looking for ways to cut corners — such as laying off about 18,000 of our employees and dropping our charitable AmazonSmile program so that we can keep every penny of what you spend on our site.
Yea, for a small personal example, my local PTO was registered on AmazonSmile. This localized, passive, small-impact charity has way more value. These are the kinds of orgs that don't necessarily...
Yea, for a small personal example, my local PTO was registered on AmazonSmile. This localized, passive, small-impact charity has way more value. These are the kinds of orgs that don't necessarily have the ability to prop up a massive fundraising arm to gather donations.
Having a few thousand people sign up to have Amazon chip in a few pennies periodically does things like fund a pizza day for 5,000 kids. Amazon couldn't post that on their website though so I guess the value is meaningless.
Here’s the most messed up part. I used to work at Amazon corporate, let me tell you how the entire program Amazon Smile got created.
So basically, when a customer wants to buy a product, they usually go straight to Amazon.com and enter what they’re looking for. But there’s also a large segment of customers who begin their search on google, and ends up at Amazon. Well guess what. When that type of search to purchase experience happens, Amazon has to pay google. Internally, Amazon thought that if they could force users to go straight to Amazon, offer a small but obviously less amount of money to charity from each customer than would have been paid to google, it would help kill customers going to google, save Amazon more money than paying google, and be good overall for the brand value of Amazon.
That’s why for the program to work, the user has to start shopping at smile.amazon.com. Until recently, the option to use amazon smile wasn't even available in the app, and even then the user still had to 'renew' being a part of Smile multiple times a year. There is no way for a customer to go through the traditional shopping experience, and then during checkout decide they want to give a portion of their purchase to charity, because giving to charity isn't the point of the overall program. Amazon Smile was developed by the Traffic Optimization team, whose entire purpose is increasing efficiency and lowering costs of getting customers to Amazon. A team of Amazon employees whose sole purpose is doing good in the world doesn't exist, despite employees repeatedly asking for such a team to be built in pretty much every single all-hands meeting.
Literally everything the company does is about profits, and extended customer lifetime value. Everything. Even the charity programs are just designed to save Amazon money.
I was already planning to reduce the amount of shopping I do on Amazon this year. Mostly due to the quality of products dropping tons and having to wade through tons of obviously Chinese knockoff...
I was already planning to reduce the amount of shopping I do on Amazon this year. Mostly due to the quality of products dropping tons and having to wade through tons of obviously Chinese knockoff brands like ERWAOBY and JOOJUUNA or whatever to find actual name-brand products. The cost of Prime has gone up, yet the service has gotten worse (like 2 day shipping basically vanishing). Plus they cancelled The Expanse...
But this just gives me another reason to use Amazon less.
Not that going to big box stores like Target or Wal-Mart is that much better. But at this point, I find Amazon to be worse than Wal-Mart.
The thing that is so frustrating to me is that some of those weird knockoff brands are probably fine for the price, if not just as good as the regular brands. But you can't trust the reviews to be...
The thing that is so frustrating to me is that some of those weird knockoff brands are probably fine for the price, if not just as good as the regular brands. But you can't trust the reviews to be from actual people, or even for the same product, so you can't rely on those to make decisions about whether a knockoff is any good or if it's a scam/poorly made trash.
Text of the notice sent:
Dear customer,
In 2013, we launched AmazonSmile to make it easier for customers to support their favorite charities. However, after almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations—more than 1 million globally—our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin.
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.
As a company, we will continue supporting a wide range of other programs that help thousands of charities and communities across the U.S. For instance:
Housing Equity Fund: We’re investing $2 billion to build and preserve affordable housing in our hometown communities. In just two years, we’ve provided funding to create more than 14,000 affordable homes—and we expect to build at least 6,000 more in the coming months. These units will host more than 18,000 moderate- to low-income families, many of them with children. In one year alone, our investments have been able to increase the affordable housing stock in communities like Bellevue, Washington and Arlington, Virginia by at least 20%.
Amazon Future Engineer: We’ve funded computer science curriculum for more than 600,000 students across over 5,000 schools—all in underserved communities. We have plans to reach an additional 1 million students this year. We’ve also provided immediate assistance to 55,000 students in our hometown communities by giving them warm clothes for the winter, food, and school supplies.
Community Delivery Program: We’ve partnered with food banks in 35 U.S. cities to deliver more than 23 million meals, using our logistics infrastructure to help families in need access healthy food – and we plan to deliver 12 million more meals this year alone. In addition to our delivery services, we’ve also donated 30 million meals in communities across the country.
Amazon Disaster Relief: We’re using our logistics capabilities, inventory, and cloud technology to provide fast aid to communities affected by natural disasters. For example, we’ve created a Disaster Relief Hub in Atlanta with more than 1 million relief items ready for deployment, our Disaster Relief team has responded to more than 95 natural disasters, and we’ve donated more than 20 million relief products to nonprofits assisting communities on the ground.
Community Giving: We support hundreds of local nonprofits doing meaningful work in cities where our employees and their families live. For example, each year we donate hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations working to build stronger communities, from youth sport leagues, to local community colleges, to shelters for families experiencing homelessness.
We’ll continue working to make a difference in many ways, and our long-term commitment to our communities remains the same—we’re determined to do every day better for our customers, our employees, and the world at large.
Thank you for being an Amazon customer.
Translation...
...from The Verge
Dear customers:
Times are hard. Manufacturing costs are up, prices are skyrocketing, our customers are balking at the increased cost of Amazon Prime, we’re facing a variety of lawsuits, and lawyers are expensive. As a result, even though our sales are up 15 percent year over year, our shareholders are getting nervous. So we’re looking for ways to cut corners — such as laying off about 18,000 of our employees and dropping our charitable AmazonSmile program so that we can keep every penny of what you spend on our site.
Sorry about that.
All our best,
Amazon
Yea, for a small personal example, my local PTO was registered on AmazonSmile. This localized, passive, small-impact charity has way more value. These are the kinds of orgs that don't necessarily have the ability to prop up a massive fundraising arm to gather donations.
Having a few thousand people sign up to have Amazon chip in a few pennies periodically does things like fund a pizza day for 5,000 kids. Amazon couldn't post that on their website though so I guess the value is meaningless.
Posted on reddit:
This is depressing but I'm not surprised.
I was already planning to reduce the amount of shopping I do on Amazon this year. Mostly due to the quality of products dropping tons and having to wade through tons of obviously Chinese knockoff brands like ERWAOBY and JOOJUUNA or whatever to find actual name-brand products. The cost of Prime has gone up, yet the service has gotten worse (like 2 day shipping basically vanishing). Plus they cancelled The Expanse...
But this just gives me another reason to use Amazon less.
Not that going to big box stores like Target or Wal-Mart is that much better. But at this point, I find Amazon to be worse than Wal-Mart.
The thing that is so frustrating to me is that some of those weird knockoff brands are probably fine for the price, if not just as good as the regular brands. But you can't trust the reviews to be from actual people, or even for the same product, so you can't rely on those to make decisions about whether a knockoff is any good or if it's a scam/poorly made trash.