After laying off a whooping 18,000 workers, Amazon has additionally published that it will no longer be running it’s in house charity program Amazon Smiles.
Amazon Smiles was started over a decade ago and was initially created to bring in more Amazon Prime memberships. The promotion was that 0.5% of every Prime account purchase would go to a charity of their choice with no extra cost to them.
The company assures the public that it was not cost cutting measure but rather that they found the program to have less of an impact than they originally hopes. Amazon says that the money “was often spread too thin.”
According to many charities that had registered with the Amazon Smiles Program, this was not the case. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, came forward and said that in November the organization received $15 million in during the ten years the program has been running.
Spread thing or not the amount of money certainly makes a difference especially to smaller charities. Crouton and Friends, an animal sanctuary in the U.S tweeted, “Amazon claims the Amazon Smile program didn’t have an impact. I can tell you as an animal not for profit it made a huge difference to us. That $9400 meant the world. That isn’t nothing to us. #amazonsmile #amazon @amazonsmile”.
Over the last decade a total of half a billion dollars had been distributed to over a million charities. What may be peanuts for the large conglomerate is certainly not for the people it serves. People have taken to social media to attest the latest news.
Cori Hundt on twitter says he is “extremely disappointed to see @amazon ending #amazonsmile. This will hurt hundreds of thousands of small non-profits that use it to diversify their organization’s income stream and work hard to stretch every penny to fulfill their missions. What a shame.”
Despite Amazon claims, Amazon Smiles had a great run and did do alot of good. Hopefully Amazon will create a program that benefits the community as much as this one did in the coming years.
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