Amazon kills ‘smile’ charity program

Bloomberg

Amazon.com Inc. is halting “AmazonSmile,” a decade-old charitable program that let customers pick a charity to receive a donation from the company equal to 0.5% of their purchases.
The announcement, which coincided with a fresh round of layoffs that will affect 18,000 Amazon employees, showed how tech industry cost-cutting could ripple through the nonprofit world.
The company, which donated $500 million to charities over 10 years in the US, UK and Germany, said the donations were spread too thin to have a meaningful impact. The average donation was about $230 because the pot of money was spread among some 1 million charities. The Smile program will officially close next month.
“The program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped,” Amazon said in a Wednesday blog. “With so many eligible organizations—more than 1 million globally—our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin.”
Amazon said it will continue to support other philanthropic initiatives, including its Housing Equity Fund, which is investing $2 billion to increase the supply of affordable housing in communities like
Bellevue, Washington, and
Arlington, Virginia.