What happens when you donate to a charity at a store checkout?

Question

I’ve seen large corporations brag about donating large sums of money to charity.

Are donations collected at checkout (E.G Checking out at Publix and the cashier asks “Would you like to donate to cancer research?”) included in those sums?

Are donations collected used for tax benefits of the corporation?

In: Economics

Answer 1

The company steals the money.

I used to run Red Nose Day charity drives for Walgreens, they advertise 90% of the donation goes to charity. But the truth is the company takes 10%, then uses about 50% to pay for all the merchandise and marketing it cost to run the drive. Then the remaining 40% goes to another company owned by Walgreens and they take half that as a “processing fee” and then a % to pay their employees.

(Also the board of Walgreens takes turns as CEO of this “other company” pocketing about 3 – 4 mil every year for themselves)

So for each dollar spent Walgreens takes 95 to 99 cents.

This is just Walgreens but I believe all the other companies do the exact same thing.