460
Outrage after airport self-service checkout asks for 18% tip
(www.the-independent.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
460 points (100.0% liked)
Not The Onion
22814 readers
983 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
The worse is H@m or Ikea asking to give money for charity (then use those amounts to ask government tax cuts).
It’s a common misconception but it is in fact illegal to claim other’s donations as donations by the corporation, and it’s not too likely that very large organisations would do that. Of course, it’s possible they’re breaking the law. It is also irritating. Why doesn’t the multibillion company just make the donation instead of harassing me.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-gets-tax-benefit-those-checkout-donations-0
Wait.
My donation it's not an income, it's just a donation. So it has its own "reference".
When the company will declare how much donation has done in the year my money will be added to that count there. In Sweden gov gives a tax break of about 30% of the donation's total amount and I guess my money will be counted there.
I don't see any other reasonable reason to mob your own customer at any purchase.
It's a way for them to appear charitable without having to fork over the money.
Also they get to choose which charity gets the money, so that can be a way for upper management to trade favors with other people in upper management on the charity or its board or, even worse, to actually put money on specific people's hands - I keenly remember when it came out that the way the IKEA owner evaded taxes in Switzerland was a convoluted ownership structure that ended up paying dividends to a registered charity in Luxembourg whose stated purposed was "The advance of interior decoration arts" and which paid for all the expenses of said IKEA owner.
Point is, there are a lot of fishing yet entirely legal things that can be done with the customer's charitable donations when a company controls which charities get it, especially since the criteria for something to be a registered Charity in certain legal jurisdictions (most notably Luxembourg and pretty much all British Crown Territories) are incredibly weak.
If you want to give money to Charity, chose yourself which and do it after at least some due diligence to filter out the ones which aren't actually using most of the money on their stated charitable objectives.
If you go door-knocking asking for donation to help the needy, you are not permitted to claim the cash as your donation. If you collect 1000 kr from your neighborhood and add 100 to it from yourself, you can claim 100 kr. Not the 1100 kr. It is the same with stores.
But Swedish and USA law may differ here.
Hopefully I'm wrong there. Still hard to understand why they want to bake that stuff in every single purchase made by card. People don't like it. Probably they're just happy to could show how much "we" donate on their campaign.
Btw, it would be much nicer if they say something like.."we would double any amount you give". That makes much more sense to me but it's not what's happening.
This myth will not die...
A company that collects your donations cannot claim those donations as tax deductible. They are your donations; you can claim them on your taxes.
Even if the company could claim them, it would be income that they would then offset, resulting in a net of zero. There would be no benefit to this.
Companies cannot and do not claim your donations to receive tax benefits. Companies do a lot of shitty things, but soliciting pocket change en masse for charities is actually one of the few good things they do.
They do, however, make sure their company representative is handing over the big check during the press event. "Look how much our company donated back to the community!"
Also they get to chose which Charity gets it, so it can be a trade of favors between their upper management and the upper management or board members of the chosen Charity, favors which in due time will be repaid.
Further, in some Legal Jurisdictions the criteria to be a charity are incredibly low - for example rich Brits often use "charitable foundations" registered in the Channel Islands that pay all their expenses as a way to evade all tax in Britain, whilst at least some years ago the method used by the owner of IKEA to evade taxes in Sweden involved a convoluted ownership structure that ended up paying IKEA's dividends to a Charity "for the progress of interior decoration" registered in Luxembourg which paid all his expenses.
Or to put it in simpler terms: if company upper management are mainly crooks in the way they choose to treat customers nowadays (a.k.a. enshittification), it makes sense they would also be crooks when it comes to charitable donations paid by customers which go via their companies.
TIL. Is this true everywhere in the world?
I'm speaking primarily for the United States and Canada, where this myth seems to be most prevalent in my experience. I am not confident enough about other places' laws to speak on them. However, many countries have similar rules regarding tax deductible charitable donations.
And unless taxes work wildly different in other countries, the part about it not being of any benefit is still true. They'd have to not claim it as income, and claim it as a tax deductible donation for there to be any net benefit, and that's just plain fraud which anyone can do.
The reason is persists is because no one believes that any company would do this without a reason. Altruism just isn't a realistic motivation for this many publicly traded companies, so what do they get out of it? I don't believe for a second that they aren't somehow making money off of this. Otherwise it would've died out long ago.
Its marketing. It allows them to generate "goodwill," which is an intangible asset that companies actually list on their balance sheets.
They get to crow about "donating to charity" while spending $0 dollars, and the only operational cost is an annoying menu prompt and a separate account at the bank for the donations.
I never said they don't have a reason. Companies get good PR out of it. Which, in itself, can make them money in the long run.
Almost Every major retailer in the US does this.
McDonalds does this too. So infuriating. "Here's your overpriced shit food we are making a ton of profit on, would you like to donate to charity as well? Think of the poor children! Feel the guilt! Ok thanks, I'll tax those tax credits from the government in which you also pay. Bye!"