Charity’s Share From Shopping Raises Concern
Sep 16th, 2010 by Annie L
As you pull your wallet out at the grocery store’s checkout line, you quickly skim over the monitor display to double check that no items were scanned twice. You have your bill ready, when the clerk asks whether or not you would like to donate $2 for good cause.
For which charity, you may ask. A clerk at a large-scale grocery store may know enough to give you the name, but retailers simply promise that your money will be donated generally. The concern of where your dollars are supposedly going leads to an ethical issue. Perhaps some companies use embedded givings as a marketing technique to increase their profit. Simply pocket the donations, keep it off of their income, and voila! A few hundred thousand dollars all to itself. If our assumption is right, not only are they exploiting its donors and whichever charity’s name they used, but also its own company’s reputation, and ultimately affects the society as a whole.