Editor’s note: This commentary is by Mike DeSanto, a co-owner of Phoenix Books and a member of the Main Street Alliance of Vermont Advisory Council.
[S]ome of you may be familiar with Amazon’s “Smile” program. It allows customers to designate a charity from a list of choices that will receive one half of 1 percent of purchases as a donation. All smiles, right?
Not quite.
As a business owner, let me offer another perspective. Renee Reiner and I, along with a couple of partners, own five bookstores in Essex, Burlington, Rutland, Chester, and Woodstock. Phoenix Books strives to support our communities in many ways: by supporting school book fairs, offering discounts for teachers, sponsoring local author events, and, not least of all, making significant, thoughtful contributions to any number of nonprofit organizations. Our contributions have no measurable reciprocal impact on our sales – and we would not expect one – and there is no direct relationship between our contributions and the number of books we sell. However, it goes without saying that without customers buying books from us there would be no money to give to the many and varied organizations that receive our contributions.
So imagine how this bookstore owner felt when I found out that some of our chosen nonprofit recipients were soliciting funds by extolling the virtues of signing up with Amazon Smile. While that perhaps seems to NGOs like easy money, or “free” money, please do the math. If a customer spends $1,000 on books or qualifying goods from Amazon, Amazon will generously contribute $5 to the designated NGO. That’s right, five whole dollars. On “eligible” sales, whatever that is and Amazon doesn’t say. On one thousand dollars in purchases! While I won’t divulge the exact amount we donated to local and regional charities last year, I will say that it was dramatically, exponentially, better proportioned than that. Here’s one concrete example: this year Phoenix Books pledged $10,000 to a very public nonprofit, one of many organizations we support. Local Amazon buyers would have to purchase at least $2 million worth of qualifying items for the organization to net that much .. TWO MILLION dollars!
But wait, you say. Why not both? Can’t a nonprofit get some funds, no matter how small, from Amazon Smile, and also funding from local businesses? Why should NGOs choose? Here’s why. Because customers have to choose. They have to choose where they shop. They have to choose whether they want to buy their books from a bookstore that resides in their community, that stocks items of local interest, that knows its citizens, that sponsors local events, that hires local help, and that supports local charities, or from a mail order company whose face they will never see and whose voice they will never hear. If a book comes from Amazon, it doesn’t come from us. And this goes for most other goods Amazon offers: Sales at Amazon directly affect the sales at local storefronts — the places that make a town appealing. Add to this that local businesses not only genuinely appreciate your business, they need your business to keep your community thriving and to continue, in turn, to make donations to local nonprofits. So a choice is necessary. It’s local, or it’s the faceless distribution chain. Its money making our communities grow, or it’s gone.
There are other issues with nonprofits and Smile as well. Any cursory internet search turns up many articles written by and for the nonprofit community that raise serious questions about the use of Smile. Questions like: Does the nonprofit receive any money? How does the nonprofit know what percentage of sales is actually being remitted? You would also find any number of ethical questions being raised as well. Let me repeat, these articles are not from upset retailers but from professional fundraisers and staff of nonprofits.
“Smile” may be a suave marketing move for Amazon, but the endgame in NGOs directing sales to Amazon would be that the 40 employees of Phoenix Books, some of whom may contribute to these same nonprofits, would be out of jobs, collecting unemployment, and maybe moving out of state. Local suppliers to our stores would lose another business who pays its bills. And five more storefronts would go vacant.
Here in Vermont there is a lot of talk about buying local. We love to talk that talk. Now, as we approach Small Business Saturday and embark on the busiest shopping season of the year, I’m asking you, our NGO leaders, and you, my fellow Vermonters, to walk the walk.
That would give all of us something to smile about.
