🙌 Quarter pound with charity

You’re standing in McDonald’s, ordering your fries and a Quarter Pounder with cheese (sorry, I’m getting ready for my flight to New York) — and suddenly the menu reminds you that children in orphanages have no toys. Instantly kills the mood!

Or you come to work — the office is decorated with garlands, there’s a Christmas tree — and next to it, a box where people throw in tights, socks, and, forgive my language, I am after all a Christian — even sanitary pads!

What’s going on here? First, let me say right away: no, nobody does this for tax deductions. The employer or McDonald’s only gets a tax deduction because, when you pay a hundred rubles, part of that money would normally be taxed. They’re simply exempted from paying that small part. That’s it.

So why do they do it? To be fair, they might still have fairly mercantile motives — after all, they’ll be the ones listing a nice round figure in the “Charity” section of their annual report, describing their achievements in the corporate blog, and the director might even receive a small gift (up to 4,000 rubles) from the children’s home or some other organization.

Or maybe not — I’m just speculating.

But what matters is something else: does society benefit from it? I think yes. Even though you (at least if you’re a Russian tax resident — that part I know for sure) could technically get a tax deduction yourself — say, donate ten thousand rubles and get 1,300 back — in practice, it’s usually not worth the hassle. Corporations, on the other hand, bring strong emotional associations into the act of giving.

When McDonald’s asks you to donate for underprivileged kids, they know you’re feeling a little guilty — you’re well-off, you’re not just eating, you’re eating out. So surely you can spare a dollar or two for the children, right?

When your employer leaves a box of pads in plain sight — they’re reminding you: yep, there are people who can’t afford basic hygiene. Yep, that’s the reality.

And now you’re not donating some abstract thousand rubles or ten euros or five hundred hryvnias — you’re giving a specific pack of pads that will help one specific woman during one specific week. You haven’t solved a global problem, but one person’s week just got a little easier.

Of course, for you as a rational economic agent, this is a nightmare: not only can’t you claim a tax deduction, you’ve bought everything at retail instead of wholesale, and you’re probably driving it somewhere on a Saturday when you could’ve just sent the money directly to a charity and let them handle it.

In short, you could’ve left charity as a side quest of your life — another tax, only voluntary.

What corporations do is manipulation. They make you think about things you’d rather not think about. But it’s those unpleasant thoughts and emotional hooks that make you actually care about the problem — instead of just “buying off” your guilt with a donation.