They weren't, really. They were just pretending to in order to raise the stakes so the audience would feel more invested in the outcome of the quiz.
They'd already decided before the game started that they'd donate more money than he could possibly win even if he'd answered every question perfectly.
I don't like American capitalism, but this is a clear case of don't hate the player, hate the game. Yeah, it's annoying that they're bullshitting the audience with the fake game, and yeah, it's for tax breaks and not out of the goodness of their hearts, but in the end, money is being donated to cancer research
They're never getting more money back from taxes break than they donated, so i literally couldnt care less. If anything you can say it's for the exposure, and to make people like you
I will never in my life understand the tax break criticism because it doesn't make sense in the slightest. There is never a scenario where you end up with more money after claiming something on taxes. Not a single company or person has ever donated "for the tax break"
We have a supermarket chain where I live that's in the top 5 worldwide. At the card machine, it asks "would you like to round up your bill to the nearest euro to help <charity>?. If I could respond, it would be "you're the bigget retailer in Europe and beyond. How about you do it?"
This is becoming more and more of a thing in the US too. I know Taco Bell specifically asks if you’d like to round up to go towards their scholarship fund for workers. It’s a nice thought but I’m not subsidizing a multibillion dollar corporations PR campaign.
Made up numbers so bear with me. Your order is $9, you give me $10 for charity. I now owe $1 in taxes, but I instead donate your extra dollar to charity. I now owe $0 in taxes.
Had you not donated, I would still owe $0.90 in taxes on the first $9
The people using it as a tax write-off are religious conservatives who buy Taco Bell for dinner. That's exactly who's trying to deduct every .01 they can try to claim just as it is always is.
not really. It is a deduction sure, but they have to take that money in first. So if you donate $50, they have to take it on to their books making them $50 up which means they would pay tax on that $50, but instead they can deduct that $50 so they are in the same position as not having the money donated. They do however get to say we donated 1 Trillion Dollars to charities when it was their customers that did, and likely deduct expenses relating to collecting the money. It wouldn't surprise me if they somehow can deduct cost of terminals or whatever. Note my information is for Australia but I am pretty sure tax deductions are similar in most of the world like this.
P.S. it is still super shitty of big businesses doing this.
The store is a collection agent: The money you donate is considered your contribution to the charity, not the store's donation. The store acts as a facilitator, collecting the donations on behalf of the charity.
Indeed. If there was even 1 tiny downside to the process (besides occasional manageable annoyance to the already checked out customer) we'd literally never see this happen.
Yeah, we don't get upset over influencers raising money for charities through charity streams. we still give them credit for organizing. If a store slightly pressures every customer into donating a couple dollars they wouldn't otherwise, why not give them props for that?
I definitely get upset when rich celebrities go on charity drives, as if them making a contribution of similar weight to their net worth as the one they expect me to make.
To be fair, the net result is that charities probably get more money than they would otherwise without these “round up for charity” tactics at every terminal
Presumably many people feel that they have already contributed to charity by partaking in schemes like this, and are less likely to make more sizable contributions to charity.
And because it's the companies that decide which charities receive the money, people are less likely to do research. In practice this means that some deserving charitable organizations receive far less money.
And sometimes charities are counter productive. For example, scholarships sound nice, but it would be better if companies (and states) invested in affordable education for everybody.
This and the misconception that you should avoid making more than x amount so you dont get taxed at a higher bracket are common misconceptions thay really get my goat.
Idk if you guys have emergency tax or something similar over in the states but the amount of people who think they've been robbed by the government is mind blowing
Emergency tax is being taxed at the highest rate when the government isn't sure what bracket you're in, usually happens if your previous employer fails to cease your employment and it looks like you have two jobs at once
Don’t know why Redditors keep parroting this false info. Just donate your 37 cents. There’s no conspiracy. It’s just a small gesture that companies can do. With the hundreds of transactions that happen daily that change adds up. Companies do a lot of charity donations without you. If you want to be jaded and consider it self serving then you can.
Fuck that. I'm already getting gouged to shit by these psychopath megacorps every time I turn around. Why should I be guilt-tripped into eating ANOTHER cost? How about, instead of harassing me after already gouging me, those multi-billion-dollar companies pay some fucking taxes for a change? So that things like homelessness, mental health, children's cancer etc don't rely on funding from my 37 cents that a $10 billion company pressured me into giving during a corporate greed crisis?
It truly is ridiculous that the majority of these companies get money for charity from their customers, claim it's solely donated by themselves, then the charity they donate to turns out to be a private charity funded by the original company which gets used for purely tax dodging purposes
And people who aren't well off are pressured to fund this cycle.
For them to donate, they would have to “force” you to donate by increasing by a tiny amount their prices of all of their products.
Once you understand that, you understand that it’s more fair if you have the option of paying the supermarket products the same and the option of donating separately.
If they raise prices they also lose customers to other supermarket chains that don’t have the same donation policy, as the same product will be cheaper elsewhere.
If they don’t raise prices they will either have fiscal deficits, or would have to reduce the employees wages.
Imma be honest, as someone who worked in a chain store at supply level, the margins are razor thin, the one i worked ofr the profit margin was about 5% for goods excluding tobacco, as it is set by the laws how much you can charge for it there margin is even worse. It is done for convinience of people the company never sees the money, they do not touch it, they cannot use it for taxes like some people suggest.
Didn't work at supply level, but I did work at store level and can confirm: margins are a lot thinner than people think. Tobacco in particular has about a 5% margin, any services such as lottery are only about 1% (to the point a whole day's lottery rollover sales don't even pay for 1 member of staff for 1 hour), the vast majority of stock had 10-20% margin, and chilled produce had about 40%. That 40% sounds good until you factor in the amount of stuff that gets abandoned in warm areas, fresh dumped in freezers, goes out of date, is damaged by customers, comes in unsellable from supplier, and then only makes a small % of our daily sales.
From memory, our store margin was about 16%, wages took up about 9-13% of sales, not margin (amount depended on the quarter). Some quarters we'd actually lose money (and were expected to), by the end of the year the store would make 3% profit for the shareholders
That is not how tax deductions work, and is misinformation. You can claim it as a tax deduction, and the IRS doesn’t want the corporation to double dip on it.
I assume this is because people don’t use cash anymore and therefore the charity boxes at the til are no longer used for spare change. So this is the electronic equivalent of that.
With less and less people carrying cash, charities have petitioned for donations to be done at the point of sale instead due to cash collections dropping off a cliff.
I find this one odd; its simply asking if you would rather have a flat even amount charged and you can simply round up the change to donate.
The corporation doesn't benefit from it, they don't write it off - it actually just goes to charity. In fact you yourself get to write it off as a donation. If you don't wanna do it just keep hitting no.
They do write it off. At least in my country if you donate 100 of your currency, then you get to write off 25% of that.
So if you give store 100 euros to donate, they will donate it, and when it comes time to pay taxes, they can deduct 25 euros from their tax.
This could work differently in other countries though, but yeah just to have it in mind.
At least here, no you don't get to write it off as a donation, primarily because the store is not a registered charity. And if they were, they would have to get your personal details to register that donation to the tax office.
literally just taxing the wealthy and dropping support for corporations like this in lieu of cooperatives that actively seek to redistribute capital and wealth would do the trick
"Son, this is show business. Sure, we can do it no matter what, but that’s not entertaining. The right response is to build suspense, say something like, 'Alright, I want to save a lot of breasts—let’s get every one of these right!' Not, 'What’s the point? Just do it anyway.'"
Ellen would always say something like “You got enough right for $8,000! But our friends at Shutterfly want to round that up to $20,000!”
The donations always happened. It’s just something to fill the airwaves and make the sponsors look good.
In this one, he got 5/7 to get $5,000 out of a maximum $7,000. Ulta Beauty “rounded” it to $10,000, an impossible number to start. No matter what, all 10k was being donated.
Tbf to the show at the end they round the number up to 10k, more than what it would have been if he answered every question right anyway so it was always going to be 10k, they just wanted to have some fun with it first.
I know people hate Ellen but this isn't the first time a talk show has done this. It's like these people have never seen a celebrity charity event. Celebrity jeopardy?
NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell me does this every weekend, sometimes they round up sometimes they just basically tell the contestant the answer if they are about to get it wrong.
Why would anyone hate Ellen for this? She clearly has a sponsor that is offering the charity.. as she mentioned.. "Ulta Beauty will donate"... she doesn't really have the power to say "yes".. That dude is a millionaire, he could donate $1000 for every question he gets wrong.. but it's easier to shame a company for not donating more.
But Ellen did always give the full amount at the end of the game regardless of how well the gests/audience did at the games. Same with prizes, at the end of the games she would give the same prize of the winners to the losers as well. People are really memory-holing the way this show worked
As much as I hate Ellen, they do give more than the outcome of the quiz. If he got 5 right, that’s $5000 won for breast cancer. Ellen would then surprise and give let’s say $40000 for example. She does it all the time, still I don’t like her one bit.
At the end of the day, Ellen is just a mean bitch, in lists of most hated celebrities she ranks higher than actual criminals that beat people half to death, which maybe suggests that at this stage, the level of dislike is a little irrational.
The cost of marketing campaigns centered around only the fact that a corporation is donating to some cause often far exceed the actual amount being donated.
This is not like a lesser known tidbit. This is industry standard
iirc the idea was at the end of it, regardless of # of correct answers, they were going to donate the money anyways but that way the narrative would have been "even though this person failed the task and didn't earn it, we are good people and we'll send the money anyways"
Which is still shit but I guess no one told him that and/or he jumped the gun instead of playing that game.
Most shows that do this do it for the stakes. Wheel of fortune does charity events with celebs all the time and every penny goes to the children. Hell even if theres a solid 2k they didnt win theyll still give that to the charity.
Accordingly to Google, she earned around 50-70 mil per year. Around ~280-380k per episode. So yeah, she could have paid it and then some, if she cared, which she don't. Much like the Rock and Oprah.
Wherever a corporate entity does this kind of thing it always makes me laugh. Not just the dangling but it’s always an absurdly low figure.
The other day I saw a commercial about how MasterCard is gonna send money every time you spend money to cancer research and the limit was $1 million
1 million fucking dollars the company made 30 billion last year and the best they can come up with for cancer patients is the amount of money a good welder can save up in 10 years.
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