Those of you who have nothing better to do than read MillersTime may have seen my post last week (Shameless Promotion) where in I touted my wife’s Sunlight Foundation. I wrote about how anyone can designate her organization to receive 0.5% of the cost of all eligible purchases from Amazon (or these contributions could be directed to any of the more than one million organizations participating in this Amazon Smile ‘give back’ program).
A number of you objected to supporting Amazon in any way, writing that this mammoth organization’s business practices among other things contribute to putting independent bookstores out of business, hurt local taxation, and take traffic away from local businesses.
My view was that as long as people are buying from Amazon, why not have some of the cost of those purchases, even though it is a very minor amount, be contributed to local or national charities?
It did not take long for one of my daughters (ERM) to set me straight on Amazon’s Smile Program and this issue. In an email the day I posted Shameless Promotion, she told me to read the first four paragraphs of a post by Lucy Bernholz of Philanthropy Wonk, which I quote here:
